5^ 

YS4- 




GIFT OF HEIRS OF 
DR. LOUIS R. KLEMM 



HISTORY PRIMERS, edited by 

J. R. Green. 



FRANCE. 



W^tov^ prtmerg. Edited by ]. R. Green. 



HISTORY 



FRANCE. 



BY 

CHARLOTTE M, YONGK 



NEW YORK: 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

I, 3, AND 5 BOND STREET. 
1882. 






Louis E. Klemm 
Beetles t 
Feb. 1926 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I. 

PAGH 

THE EARLIER KINGS OF FRANCE I 

CHAPTER II. 

THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR 2$ 

CHAPTER III. 

THE STRUGGLE WITH BURGUNDY , . 43 

CHAPTER IV. 

THE ITALIAN WARS 52 

CHAPTER V. 

THE WARS OF RELIGION 63 

CHAPTER VI. 

POWER OF THE CROWN 81 

CHAPTER VII. 

THE REVOLUTION 102 

CHAPTER VIII. 

FRANCE SINCE THE REVOLUTION I16 



MAP OF FRANCE. 




,5,0 roo lj O.Mile3 



Lendai3:3IaemiIIan& Co. 



Stimfordi Geogi Ettabi 



Shelving the Provinces. 



MAP OFFRANCF 




^fmiford'a Geog' Eatab.t 



Shewing the Departments, 



FRANCE. 

CHAPTER I. 

THE EARLIER KINGS OF FRANCE. 

I. France. — The country we now know as France 
is the tract of land shut in by the British Channel, the 
Bay of Biscay, the Pyrenees, the Mediterranean, and 
the Alps. But this country only gained the name of 
France by degrees. In the earliest days of which we 
have any account, it was peopled by the Celts, and it 
was known to the Romans as part of a larger country 
which bore the name of Gaul. After ail of it, save the 
north-western moorlands, or what we now call Brittany, 
had been conquered and settled by the Romans, it 
was overrun by tribes of the great Teutonic race, the 
same family to which Englishmen belong. Of these 
tribes, the Goths settled in the provinces to the south ; 
the Burgundians, in the east, around the Jura ; while 



2 FRANCE. [CHAP. 

the Franks, coming over the rivers in its unprotected 
north-eastern corner, and making themselves masters 
of a far wider territory, broke up into two kingdoms — ■ 
that of the Eastern Franks m what is now Germany, 
and that of the Western Franks reaching from the 
Rhine to the Atlantic. These Franks subdued all the 
other Teutonic conquerors of Gaul, while they adopted 
the religion, the language, and some of the civilization 
of the Romanized Gauls who became their subjects. 
Under the second Frankish dynasty, the Empire was 
renewed in the West, where it had been for a time 
put an end to by these Teutonic invasions, and the 
then Frankish king, Charles the Great, took his place 
as Emperor at its head. But in the time of his grand- 
sons the various kingdoms and nations of which the 
Empire was composed, fell apart again under different 
descendants of his. One of these, Charles the Bald^ 
was made King of the Western Franks in what was 
termed the Neustrian, or "not eastern," kingdom, 
from which the present France has sprung. This 
kingdom in name covered all the country west of the 
Upper Meuse, but practically the Neustrian king had 
little power south of the Loire ; and the Celts of 
Brittany were never included in it. 

2. The House of Paris. — The great danger 
which this Neustrian kingdom had to meet came 
from the Northmen, or as they were called in Eng- 



I.] THE HOUSE OF PARIS. 3 

land the Danes. These ravaged in Neustria as they 
ravaged in England j and a large part of the northern 
coast, including the mouth of the Seine, was given by 
Charles the Bald to Rolf or Rollo, one of their 
leaders, whose land became known as the Northman's 
land, or Normandy. What most checked the ravages 
of these pirates was the resistance of Paris, a town 
which commanded the road along the river Seine ; 
and it was in defending the city of Paris from the 
Northmen that a warrior named Robert the Strong 
gained the trust and affection of the inhabitants of the 
Neustrian kingdom. He and his family became 
Counts {i.e., judges and protectors) of Paris, and 
Dukes (or leaders) of the Franks. Three generations 
of them were really great men — Robert the Strong, 
Odo, and Hugh the White;- and when the descendants 
of Charles the Great had died out, a Duke of the 
Franks, Hugh Capet, was in 987 crowned King of the 
Franks. All the after kings of France down to Louis 
Philippe were descendants of Hugh Capet. By this 
change, however, he gained little in real power ; for, 
though he claimed to rule over the whole country of 
the Neustrian Franks, his authority was little heeded, 
save in the domain which he had possessed as Count 
of Paris, including the cities of Paris, Orleans, Amiens, 
and Rheims (the coronation place). He was guar- 
dian, too, of the great Abbeys of St. Denys and St. 
Martin of Tours. The Duke of Normandy and the 



4 FRANCE. [chap. 

Count of Anjou to the west, the Count of Planders to 
the north, the Count of Champagne to the east, and 
the Duke of Aquitaine to the south, paid him homage, 
but were the only actual rulers in their own domains. 

3. The Kingdom of Hugh Capet— The lan- 
guage of Hugh's kingdom was clipped Latin ; the pea- 
santry and townsmen were mostly Gaulish; the nobles 
were almost entirely Frank. There was an under- 
standing that the king could only act by their con- 
sent, and must be chosen by them; but matters went 
more by old custom and the right of the strongest 
than by any law. A Salic law, so called from the place 
whence the Franks had come, was supposed to exist ; 
but this had never been used by their subjects, whose 
law remained that of the old Roman Empire. Both of 
these systems of law, however, fell into disuse, and were 
replaced by rude bodies of "customs," which gradually 
grew up. The habits of the time were exceedingly rude 
and ferocious. The Franks had been the fiercest and 
most untamable of all the Teutonic nations, and only 
submitted themselves to the influence of Christianity 
and civilization from the respect which the Roman 
Empire inspired. Charles the Great had tried to 
bring in Roman cultivation, but we find him reproach- 
ing the young Franks in his schools with letting them- 
selves be surpassed by the Gauls, whom they despised ; 
and in the disorders that followed his death, barbarism 



I.] THE KINGDOM OF HUGH CAPET. 5 

increased again. The convents alone kept up any 
remnants of culture \ but as the fury of the Northmen 
was chiefly directed to them, numbers had been de- 
stroyed, and there was more ignorance and wretched- 
ness than at any other time. In the duchy of 
Aquitaine, much more of the old Roman civilization 
survived, both among the cities and the nobility ; and 
the Normans, newly settled in the north, had brought 
with them the vigour of their race. They had taken 
up such dead or dying culture as they found in France, 
and were carrying it further, so as in some degree to 
awaken their neighbours. Kings and their great 
vassals could generally read and write, and understand 
the Latin in which all records were made, but few 
except the clergy studied at all. There were schools 
in convents, and already at Paris a university was 
growing up for the study of theology, grammar, law, 
philosophy, and music, the sciences which were held 
to form a course of education. The doctors of these 
sciences lectured ; the scholars of low degree lived, 
begged, and struggled as best they could ; and gentle- 
men were lodged with clergy, who served as a sort of 
private tutors. 

4. Earlier Kings of the House of Paris. — 

Neither Hugh nor the next three kings {Robert, 996- 
1031; Henry, \oT^\-\o(io\ Philip, 1060-1 108) were 
able men, and they were almost helpless among the 



6 FRANCE. [CHAP. 

fierce nobles of their own domain, and the great counts 
and dukes around them. Castles were built of huge 
strength, and served as nests of plunderers, who preyed 
on travellers and made war on each other, grievously 
tormenting one another's "villeins" — as the peasants 
were termed. Men could travel nowhere in safety, 
and horrid ferocity and misery prevailed. The first 
three kings were good and pious men, but too 
weak to deal with their rufiEian nobles. Robert, called 
the Pious, was extremely devout, but weak. He 
became embroiled with the Pope on account of having 
married Bertha — a lady pronounced to be within the 
degrees of affinity prohibited by the Church. He was 
excommunicated, but held out till there was a greai''^ 
religious reaction, produced by the belief that the 
world would end in looo. In this expectation many 
persons left their land untilled, and the consequence 
was a terrible famine, followed by a pestilence ; and 
the misery of France was probably unequalled in this 
reign, when it was hardly possible to pass safely from 
one to another of the three royal cities, Paris, Orleans, 
and Tours. Beggars swarmed, and the king gave to 
them everything he could lay his hands on, and even 
winked at their stealing gold off his dress, to the great 
wrath of a second wife, the imperious Constance of 
Provence, who, coming from the more luxurious and 
corrupt south, hated and despised the roughness and 
asceticism of her husband. She was a fierce and 



I.] EARLIER KINGS OF HOUSE OF PARIS. 7 

passionate woman, and brought an element of cruelty 
into the court. In this reign the first instance of per- 
secution to the death for heresy took place. The vic- 
tim had been the queen's confessor ; but so far was she 
from pitying him that she struck out one of his eyes 
with her staff, as he was led past her to the hut where 
he was shut in and burnt. On Robert's death Con- 
stance took part against her son, Henry I., on behalf 
of his younger brother, but Henry prevailed. During 
his reign the clergy succeeded in proclaiming what 
was called the Truce of God, which forbade war and 
bloodshed at certain seasons of the year and on certain 
days of the week, and made churches and clerical 
lands places of refuge and sanctuary, which often 
indeed protected the lawless, but which also saved 
the weak and oppressed. It was during these reigns 
that the Papacy was beginning the great struggle for 
temporal power, and freedom from the influence of the 
Empire, which resulted in the increased independence 
and power of the clergy. The religious fervour which 
had begun with the century led to the foundation of 
many monasteries, and to much grand church architec- 
ture. In the reign of F/ulzp I., William, Duke of Nor- 
mandy, obtained the kingdom of England, and thus 
became far more powerful than his suzerain, the King 
of France, a weak man of vicious habits, who lay for 
many years of his life under sentence of excommuni- 
cation for an adulterous marriage with Bertrade de 



8 FRANCE. [CHAP. 

Montfort, Countess of Anjou. The power of the king 
and of the law was probably at the very lowest ebb 
during the time of Philip I., though minds and manners 
were less debased than in the former century. 

5. The First Crusade (1095 — hoc). — Pilgrimage 
to the Holy Land had now become one great means by 
which the men of the West sought pardon for their 
sins. Jerusalem had long been held by the Arabs, 
who had treated the pilgrims well ; but these had been 
conquered by a fierce Turcoman tribe, who robbed and 
oppressed the pilgrims. Peter the Hermit, returning 
from a pilgrimage, persuaded Pope Urban II. that it 
would be well to stir up Christendom to drive back 
the Moslem power, and deliver Jerusalem and the 
holy places. Urban 11. accordingly, when holding a 
council at Clermont, in Auvergne, permitted Peter to 
describe in glowing words the miseries of pilgrims and 
the profanation of the holy places. Cries broke out, 
" God wills it ! " and multitudes thronged to receive 
crosses cut out in cloth, which were fastened to the 
shoulder, and pledged the wearer to the holy war or 
crusade, as it was called. Philip I. took no interest in 
the cause, but his brother Hugh, Count of Vermandois, 
Stephen, Count of Blois, Robert, Duke of Normandy, 
and Raymond, Count of Toulouse, joined the expe- 
dition, which was made under Godfrey of Bouillon, 
Duke of Lower Lorraine, or what we now call the 



I.] THE FIRST CRUSADE. 9 

Netherlands. The crusade proved successful ; Jeru- 
salem was gained, and a kingdom of detached cities 
and forts was founded in Palestine, of which Godfrey- 
became the first king. The whole of the West was sup- 
posed to keep up the defence of the Holy Land, but, in 
fact, most of those who went as armed pilgrims were 
either French, Normans, or Aquitanians ; and the men 
of the East called all alike Franks. Two orders of 
monks, who were also knights, became the permanent 
defenders of the kingdom — the Knights of St. John, 
also called Hospitallers, because they also lodged pil- 
grims and tended the sick; and the Knights Templars. 
Both had establishments in different countries in 
Europe, where youths were trained to the rules of their 
order. The old custom of solemnly girding a young 
warrior with his sword was developing into a system 
by which the nobly born man was trained through 
the ranks of page and squire to full knighthood, and 
made to take vows which bound him to honourable 
customs to equals, though, unhappily, no account was 
taken of his inferiors. 

6. Louis VI. and VI I. — Philip's son, Louis VI., 
or the Fat, v/as the first able man whom the line of 
Hugh Capet had produced since it mounted the 
throne. He made the first attempt at curbing the 
nobles, assisted by Suger, the Abbot of St. Denys. 
The only possibility of doing this was to obtain the 



lo FRANCE. [CHAP. 

aid of one party of nobles against another ; and when 
any unusually flagrant offence had been committed, 
Louis called together the nobles, bishops, and abbots 
of his domain, and obtained their consent and assist- 
ance in making war on the guilty man, and over- 
throwing his castle, thus, in some degree, lessening 
the sense of utter impunity which had caused so 
many violences and such savage recklessness. He 
also permitted a few of the cities to purchase the 
right of self-government, and freedom from the ill 
usage of the counts, who, from their guardians, had 
become their tyrants ; but in this he seems not to 
have been so much guided by any fixed principle, as 
by his private interests and feelings towards the in- 
dividual city or lord in question. However, the royal 
authority had begun to be respected by 1137, when 
Louis VI. died, having just effected the marriage of 
his son, Louis VII., with Eleanor, the heiress of the 
Dukes of Aquitaine — thus hoping to make the crown 
really more powerful than the great princes who owed 
it homage. At this time lived the great St. Bernard, 
Abbot of Clairvaux, who had a wonderful influence 
over men's minds. It was a time of much thought 
and speculation, and Peter Abailard, an able student 
of the Paris University, held a controversy with Ber- 
nard, in which we see the first struggle between in- 
tellect and authority. Bernard roused the young 
king, Louis VI I. , to go on the second crusade, which 



I.] LOUIS VI. AND VII. II 

was undertaken by the Emperor and the other princes 
of Europe to relieve the distress of the kingdom of 
Palestine. France had no navy, so the war was by 
land, through the rugged hills of Asia Minor, where 
the army was almost destroyed by the Saracens. 
Though Louis did reach Palestine, it was with 
weakened forces ; he could effect nothing by his 
campaign, and Eleanor, who had accompanied him, 
seems to have been entirely corrupted by the evil 
habits of the Franks settled in the East. Soon 
after his return, Louis dissolved his marriage; and 
Eleanor became the wife of Henry, Count of Anjou, 
who soon after inherited the kingdom of England as 
our Henry IL, as well as the duchy of Normandy, 
and betrothed his third son to the heiress of Brittany. 
Eleanor's marriage seemed to undo all that Louis VL 
had done in raising the royal power ; for Henry com- 
pletely overshadowed Louis, whose only resource was 
in feeble endeavours to take part against him in his 
many family quarrels. The whole reign of Louis the 
Young, the title that adhered to him on account of 
his simple, childish nature, is only a record of weak- 
ness and disaster, till he died in 1180. What hfe 
went on in France, went on principally in the south. 
The lands of Aquitaine and Provence had never 
dropped the old classical love of poetry and art. 
A softer form of broken Latin was then spoken, and 
the art of minstrelsy was frequent among all ranks. 



12 FRANCE. [CHAP. 

Poets were called troubadours and trouvhrs (finders). 
Courts of love were held, where there were com- 
petitions in poetry, the prize being a golden violet; 
and many of the bravest warriors were also distin- 
guished troubadours — among them the elder sons of 
Queen Eleanor. There was much license of manners, 
much turbulence ; and as the Aquitanians hated 
Angevin rule, the troubadours never ceased to stir 
up the sons of Henry II. against him. 

7. Philip II. (1180— 1223).— Powerful in fact as 
Henry 11. was, it was his gathering so large a part of 
France under his rule which was, in the end, to build 
up the greatness of the French kings. What had 
held them in check was the existence of the great 
fiefs or provinces, each with its own line of dukes or 
counts, and all practically independent of the king. 
But now nearly all the provinces of southern and 
western France were gathered into the hand of a 
single ruler; and though he was a Frenchman in 
blood, yet, as he was King of England, this ruler 
seemed to his French subjects no Frenchman, but a 
foreigner. They began therefore to look to the 
French king to free them from a foreign ruler; and 
the son of Louis VII., called Philip Augustus, was 
ready to take advantage of their disposition. Philip 
was a really able man, making up by address for want 
of personal courage. He set himself to lower the 



I.] PHILIP IL 13 

power of the house of Anjou and increase that of 
the house of Paris. As a boy he had watched con- 
ferences between his father and Henry under the 
great elm of Gisors, on the borders of Normandy, 
and seeing his father overreached, he laid up a 
store of hatred to the rival king. As soon as he 
had the power, he cut down the elm, which was so 
large that 300 horsemen could be sheltered under its 
branches. He supported the sons of Henry H. in 
their rebellions, and was always the bitter foe of the 
head of the family. Philip assumed the cross in 1187, 
on the tidings of the loss of Jerusalem, and in 11 90 
joined Richard I. of England at Messina, where they 
wintered, and then sailed for St. Jean d'Acre. After 
this city was taken, Philip returned to France, where 
he continued to profit by the crimes and dissensions 
of the Angevins, and gained, both as their enemy 
and as King of France. When Richard's successor, 
John, murdered Arthur, the heir of the dukedom of 
Brittany and claimant of both Anjou and Normandy, 
Philip took advantage of the general indignation to 
hold a court of peers, in which John, on his non- 
appearance, was adjudged to have forfeited his fiefs. 
In the war which followed and ended in 1204, 
Philip not only gained the great Norman dukedom, 
which gave him the command of Rouen and of the 
mouth of tlfe Seine, as well as Anjou, Maine, and 
Poitou, the countries which held the Loire in their 



14 FRANCE. [CHAP. 

power, but established the precedent that a crown 
vassal was amenable to justice, and might be made to 
forfeit his lands. What he had won by the sword 
he held by wisdom and good government. Seeing 
that the cities were capable of being made to balance 
the power of the nobles, he granted them privileges 
which caused him to be esteemed their best friend, 
and he promoted all improvements. Though once 
laid under an interdict by Pope Innocent III. for 
an unlawful marriage, Philip usually followed the 
policy which gained for the Kings of France the title 
of *'Most Christian King." The real meaning of this 
was that he should always support the Pope against 
the Emperor, and in return be allowed more than 
ordinary power over his clergy. The great feudal 
vassals of eastern France, with a strong instinct that 
he was their enemy, made a league with the Emperor 
Otto IV. and his uncle King John, against Philip 
Augustus. John attacked him in the south, and was 
repulsed by Philip's son, Louis, called the "Lion;" 
while the king himself, backed by the burghers of his 
chief cities, gained at Bouvines, over Otto, the first 
real French victory, in 12 14, thus establishing the 
power of the crown. Two years later, Louis the 
Lion, who had married John's niece, Blanche of 
Castile, was invited by the English barons to become 
their king on John's refusing to be bound by the 
Great Charter; and Philip saw his son actually in 



I.] THE ALBIGENSES. 15 

possession of London at the time of the death of the 
last of the sons of his enemy, Henry II. On John's 
death, however, the barons preferred his child to the 
French prince, and fell away from Louis, who was 
forced to return to France. 

8. The Albigenses (1203— 1240). — The next 
great step in the building up of the French kingdom 
was made by taking advantage of a religious strife in 
the south. The lands near the Mediterranean still 
had much of the old Roman cultivation, and also of 
the old corruption, and here arose a sect called the 
Albigenses, who held opinions other than those of 
the Church on the origin of e^dl. Pope Innocent 
III., after sending some of the order of friars freshly 
established by the Spaniard, Dominic, to preach to 
them in vain, declared them as great enemies of 
the faith as Mahometans, and proclaimed a crusade 
against them and their chief supporter, Raymond, 
Count of Toulouse. Shrewd old King Philip merely 
permitted this crusade; but the dislike of the north 
of France to the south made hosts of adventurers flock 
to the banner of its leader, Simon de Montfort, a 
Norman baron, devout and honourable, but harsh and 
pitiless. Dreadful execution was done ; the whole 
country was laid waste, and Raymond reduced to 
such distress that Peter I., King of Aragon, who was 
regarded as the natural head of the southern races. 



i6 FRANCE. [CHAP. 

came to his aid, but was defeated and slain at the 
battle of Muret. After this Raymond was forced to 
submit, but such hard terms were forced on him that 
his people revolted. His country was granted to De 
Montfort, who laid siege to Toulouse, and was killed 
before he could take the city. The war was then 
carried on by Louis the Lio7t, who had succeeded 
his father as Louis VIII. in 1223, though only to 
reign three years, as he died of a fever caught in a 
southern campaign in 1226. His widow, Blanche, 
made peace in the name of her son. Louts LX., and 
Raymond was forced to give his only daughter in 
marriage to one of her younger sons. On their 
death, the county of Toulouse lapsed to the crown, 
which thus became possessor of all southern France, 
save Guienne, which still remained to the English 
kings. But the whole of the district once peopled 
by the Albigenses had been so much wasted as never 
to recover its prosperity, and any cropping up of 
their opinions was guarded against by the establish- 
ment of the Inquisition, which appointed Dominican 
friars to inquire into and exterminate all that differed 
from the Church. At the same time the order of St. 
Francis did much to instruct and quicken the con- 
sciences of the people; and at the universities — 
especially that ' of Paris — a great advance both in 
thought and learning was made. Louis IX.'s con- 
fessor, Henry de Sorbonne, founded, for the study of 



I.] THE PARLIAMENT OF PARIS. 17 

divinity, the college which was known by his name, 
and whose decisions were afterwards received as of 
paramount authority. 

9. The Parliament of Paris. ^France had a 
wise ruler in Blanche, and a still better one in her 
son, Louis IX., who is better known as St Louis, and 
who was a really good and great man. He was the 
first to establish the Parliament of Paris — a court con- 
sisting of the great feudal vassals, lay and ecclesiastical, 
who held of the king direct, and who had to try all 
causes. They much disliked giving such attendance, 
and a certain number of men trained to the law were 
added to them to guide the decisions. The Parlia- 
ment was thus only a court of justice and an office for 
registering wills and edicts. The representative assem- 
bly of France was called the States-General, and con- 
sisted of all estates of the realm, but was only sum- 
moned in time of emergency. Louis IX. was the first 
king to bring nobles of the highest rank to submit to 
the judgment of Parliament when guilty of a crime. 
Enguerrand de Coucy, one of the proudest nobles of 
France, who had hung two Flemish youths for killing 
a rabbit, was sentenced to death. The penalty was 
commuted, but the principle was estabHshed. Louis's 
uprightness and wisdom gained him honour and love 
everywhere, and he was always remembered as sitting 
under the great oak at Vincennes. doing equal justice to 



i8 FRANCE. [CHAP. 

rich and poor. Louis was equally upright in his dealings 
with foreign powers. He would not take advantage of 
the weakness of Henry IH. of England to attack his 
lands in Guienne, though he maintained the right of 
France to Normandy as having been forfeited by King 
John. So much was he respected that he was called 
in to judge between Henry and his barons, respecting 
the oaths exacted from the king by the Mad Parlia- 
ment. His decision in favour of Henry was probably 
an honest one 3 but he was misled by the very 
different relations of the French and English kings to 
their nobles, who in France maintained lawlessness 
and violence, while in England they were struggling 
for law and order. Throughout the struggles between 
the Popes and the Emperor Frederick H., Louis would 
not be induced to assist in a persecution of the Em- 
peror which he considered unjust, nor permit one of 
his sons to accept the kingdom of Apulia and Sicily, 
when the Pope declared that Frederick had forfeited 
it. He could not, however, prevent his brother 
Charles, Count of Anjou, from accepting it; for Charles 
had married Beatrice, heiress of the imperial fief of 
Provence, and being thus independent of his brother 
Louis, was able to establish a branch of the French 
royal family on the throne at Naples. The reign of 
St. Louis was a time of much progress and improve- 
ment. There were great scholars and thinkers at all 
the universities. Romance and poetry were flourish- 



I.] CRUSADE OF LOUIS IX. 19 

ing, and influencing people's habits, so that courtesy, 
i.e. the manners taught in castle courts, was softening 
the demeanour of knights and nobles. Architecture 
was at its most beautiful period, as is seen, above all, 
in the Sainte Chapelle at Paris. This was built by 
Louis IX. to receive a gift of the Greek Emperor, 
namely, a thorn, which was believed to be from the 
crown of thorns. It is one of the most perfect 
buildings in existence. 

10. Crusade of Louis IX. — Unfortunately, Louis, 
during a severe illness, made a vow to go on a cru- 
sade. His first fulfilment of this vow was made early 
in his reign, in 1250, when his mother was still 
alive to undertake the regency. His attempt was 
to attack the heart of the Saracen power in Egypt, 
and he effected a landing and took the city of 
Damietta. There he left his queen, and advanced 
on Cairo; but near Mansourah he found himself 
entangled in the canals of the Nile, and with a great 
army of Mamelukes in front. A ford was found, 
and the English Earl of Salisbury, who had brought 
a troop to join the crusade, advised that the first to 
cross should wait and guard the passage of the next. 
But the king's brother, Robert, Count of Artois, called 
this cowardice. The earl was stung, and declared he 
would be as forward among the foe as any French- 
man. They both charged headlong, were enclosed by 



20 FRANCE, [CHAP. 

the enemy, and slain ; and though the king at last put 
the Mamelukes to flight, his loss was dreadful. The 
Nile rose and cut off his return. He lost great part of 
his troops from sickness, and was horribly harassed by 
the Mamelukes, who threw among his host a strange 
burning missile, called Greek fire ; and he was finally 
forced to surrender himself as a prisoner at Man- 
sourah, with all his army. He obtained his release by 
giving up Damietta, and paying a heavy ransom. 
After twenty years, in 1270, he attempted another 
crusade, which was still more unfortunate, for he 
landed at Tunis to wait for his brother to arrive from^ 
Sicily, apparently on some delusion of favourable dis- 
positions on the part of the Bey. Sickness broke out 
in the camp, and the king, his daughter, and his third 
son all died of fever ; and so fatal was the expedition, 
that his son Philip IH. returned to France escorting 
five coffins, those of his father, his brother, his sister 
and her husband, and his own wife and child. 

II. Philip the Fair. — The reign of Philip III. 
was very short. The insolence and cruelty of the 
Provengals in Sicily had provoked the natives to a 
massacre known as the SiciHan Vespers, and they 
then called in the King of Aragon, who finally 
obtained the island, as a separate kingdom from 
that on the Italian mainland where Charles of 
Anjou and his descendants still reigned. While 



I.] PHILIP THE FAIR. 21 

fighting his uncle's battles on the Pyrenees, and be- 
sieging Gerona, Philip III. caught a fever, and died 
on his way home in 1285. His successor, Philip IV., 
called the Fair, was crafty, cruel, and greedy, and 
made the Parliament of Paris the instrument of his 
violence and exactions, which he carried out in the 
name of the law. To prevent Guy de Dampierre, 
Count of Flanders, from marrying his daughter to the 
son of Edward I. of England, he invited her and her 
father to his court, and threw them both into prison, 
while he offered his own daughter Isabel to Edward 
of Carnarvon in her stead. The Scottish wars pre- 
vented Edward I. from taking up the cause of Guy ; 
but the Pope, Boniface VIIL, a man of a fierce 
temper, though of a great age, loudly called on Philip 
to do justice to Flanders, and likewise blamed in un- 
measured terms his exactions from the clergy, his 
debasement of the coinage, and his foul and vicious 
life. Furious abuse passed on both sides. Philip 
availed himself of a flaw in the Pope's election to 
threaten him with deposition, and in return was ex- 
communicated. He then sent a French knight named 
William de Nogaret, with Sciarra Colonna, a turbulent 
Roman, the hereditary enemy of Boniface, and a band 
of savage mercenary soldiers to Anagni, where the 
Pope then was, to force him to recall the sentence, ap- 
parently intending them to act like the murderers of 
Becket. The old man's dignity, however, overawed 



22 FRANCE. [CHAP. 

them at the moment, and they retired without laying 
hands on him, but the shock he had undergone caused 
his death a few days later. His successor was poisoned 
almost immediately on his election, being known to be 
adverse to Philip. Parties were equally balanced in 
the conclave ; but Philip's friends advised him to buy 
over to his interest one of his supposed foes, whom 
they would then unite in choosing. Bertrand de 
Goth, Archbishop of Bordeaux, was the man, and in a 
secret interview promised Philip to fulfil six conditions 
if he were made Pope by his interest. These were : 
I St, the reconciliation of Philip with the Church; 2nd, 
that of his agents ; 3rd, a grant to the king of a tenth 
of all clerical property for five years ; 4th, the restora- 
tion of the Colonna family to Rome; 5 th, the censure 
of Boniface's memory. These five were carried out 
by Clement V., as he called himself, as soon as he was 
on the Papal throne ; the sixth remained a secret, but 
was probably the destruction of the Knights Templars. 
This order of military monks had been created for 
the defence of the crusading kingdom of Jerusalem, 
and had acquired large possessions in Europe. Now 
that their occupation in the East was gone, they were 
hated and dreaded by the kings, and Philip was resolved 
on their wholesale destruction. 

12. The Papacy at Avignon. — Clement had 
never quitted France, but ha<d gone through the cere- 



I.] THE PAPACY AT AVIGNON. 23 

monies of his installation at Lyons ; and Philip, fearing 
that in Italy he would avoid carrying out the scheme 
for the ruin of the Templars, had him conducted to 
Avignon, a city of the Empire which belonged to the 
Angevin King of Naples, as Count of Provence, and 
there for eighty years the Papal court remained. As 
they were thus settled close to the French frontier, 
the Popes became almost vassals of France ; and this 
added greatly to the power and renown of the French 
kings. How real their hold on the Papacy was, was 
shown in the ruin of the Templars. The order was 
now abandoned by the Pope, and its knights were 
invited in large numbers to Paris, under pretence of 
arranging a crusade. Having been thus entrapped, 
they were accused of horrible and monstrous crimes, 
and torture elicited a few supposed confessions. They 
were then tried by the Inquisition, and the greater 
number were put to death by fire, the Grand Master 
last of all, while their lands were seized by the king. 
They seem to have been really a fierce, arrogant, and 
oppressive set of men, or else there must have been 
some endeavour to save them, belonging, as most 
of them did, to noble French famihes. The "Pest 
of France," as Dante calls Philip the Fair, was 
now the most formidable prince in Europe. He 
contrived to annex to his dominions the city of 
Lyons, hitherto an imperial city under its archbishop. 
Philip died in 13 14; and his three sons — Louis X.^ 



24 FRANCE. [CHAP. i. 

Philip v., and Cha?'les IV. — were as cruel and harsh ^ 
as himself, but without his talent, and brought the 
crown and people to disgrace and misery. Each 
reigned a few years and then died, leaving only 
daughters, and the question arose whether the inherit- 
ance should go to females. When Louis X. died, in 
13 16, his brother Philip, after waiting for the birth of a 
posthumous child who only lived a few days, took the 
crown, and the Parliament then declared that the law 
of the old Salian Franks had been against the in- 
heritance of women. By this newly discovered Salic 
law, Charles IV., the third brother, reigned on Phihp's 
death ; but the kingdom of Navarre having accrued 
to the family through their grandmother, and not 
being subject to the Salic law, went to the eldest 
daughter of Louis X., Jane, wife of the Count of 
Evreux. 



CHAPTER 11. 

THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR. 

I. "Wars of Edv^ard III. — By the Salic law, 
as the lawyers called it, the crown was given, on 
the death of Charles IV., to Philips Count of Valois, 
son to a brother of Philip IV., but it was claimed 
by Edward III. of England as son of the daughter 
of Philip IV. Edward contented himself, however, 
with the mere assertion of his pretensions, until Philip 
exasperated him by attacks on the borders of Guienne, 
which the French kings had long been coveting to 
complete their possession of the south, and by demand- 
ing the surrender of Robert of Artois, who, being 
disappointed in his claim to the county of Artois 
by the judgment of the Parliament of Paris, was 
practising by sorcery on the life of the King of France. 
Edward then declared war, and his supposed right 
caused a century of warfare between France and Eng- 
land, in which the broken, down-trodden state of the 
French peasantry gave England an immense advantage. 



26 FRANCE. [chap. 

The knights and squires were fairly matched; but 
while the English yeomen were strong, staunch, and 
trustworthy, the French were useless, and only made 
a defeat worse by plundering the fallen on each side 
alike. The war began in Flanders, where Philip took 
the part of the count, whose tyrannies had caused his 
expulsion. Edward was called in to the aid of the 
citizens of Ghent by their leader Jacob van Arteveldt; 
and gained a great victory over the French fleet at 
Sluys, but with no important result. At the same time 
the two kings took opposite sides in the war of the 
succession in Brittany, each defending the claim most 
inconsistent with his own pretensions to the French 
crown — Edward upholding the male heir, John de 
Montfort, and Philip the direct female representative, 
the wife of Charles de Blois. 

2. Crecy and Poitiers. — Further difficulties 
arose through Charles the Bad, King of Navarre 
and Count of Evreux, who was always on the watch 
to assert his claim to the French throne through 
his mother, the daughter of Louis X., and was 
much hated and distrusted by Philip VI. and his 
son John, Duke of Normandy. Fearing the dis- 
affection of the Norman and Breton nobles, Philip 
invited a number of them to a tournament at Paris, 
and there had them put to death after a hasty form 
of trial, thus driving their kindred to join his 



11.] CRECY AND POITIERS. 27 

enemies. One of these offended Normans, Godfrey of 
Harcourt, invited Edward to Normandy, where he 
landed, and having consumed his suppHes was on his 
march to Flanders, when Philip, with the whole strength 
of the kingdom, endeavoured to intercept him at 
Cre9y in Picardy, in 1348. Philip was utterly in- 
capable as a general ; his knights were wrong-headed 
and turbulent, and absolutely cut down their own 
Genoese hired archers for being in their way. The 
defeat was total. Philip rode away to Amiens, and 
Edward laid siege to Calais. The place was so 
strong that he was forced to blockade it, and Philip 
had time to gather another army to attempt its rehef ; 
but the English army were so posted that he could 
not attack them without great loss. He retreated, 
and the men of Calais surrendered, Edward insisting 
that six burghers should bring him the keys with ropes 
round their necks, to submit themselves to him. Six 
offered themselves, but their lives were spared, and 
they were honourably treated. Edward expelled all the 
French, and made Calais an English settlement. A 
truce followed, chiefly in consequence of the ravages 
of the Black Death, which swept off multitudes 
throughout Europe, a pestilence apparently bred 
by filth, famine, and all the miseries of war and law- 
lessness, but which spared no ranks. It had scarcely 
ceased before Philip died, in 1350. His son, John^ 
was soon involved in a fresh war with England by the 



28 FRANCE. [chap. 

intrigues of Charles the Bad, and in 1356 advanced 
southwards to check the Prince of Wales, who had 
come out of Guienne on a plundering expedition. 
The French were again totally routed at Poitiers, and 
the king himself, with his third son, Philip, were made 
prisoners and carried to London with most of the 
chief nobles. 

3. The Jacquerie. — The calls made on their 
vassals by these captive nobles to supply their 
ransoms brought the misery to a height. The salt tax, 
or gabelle, which was first imposed to meet the ex- 
penses of the war, was only paid by those who were 
neither clergy nor nobles, and the general saying was 
— "Jacques Bonhomme (the nickname for the peasant) 
has a broad back, let him bear all the burthens." 
Either by the king, the feudal lords, the clergy, or 
the bands of men-at-arms who roved through the 
country, selling themselves to any prince who would 
employ them, the wretched people were stripped of 
everything, and used to hide in holes and caves 
from ill-usage or insult, till they broke out in a re- 
bellion called the Jacquerie, and whenever they 
could seize a castle revenged themselves, like the 
brutes they had been made, on those within it. 
Taxation was so levied by the king's officers as to 
be frightfully oppressive, and corruption reigned every- 
where. As the king was in prison, and his heir, 



11.] THE JACQUERIE. 29 

Charles, had fled ignominiously from Poitiers, the citi- 
zens of Paris hoped to effect a reform, and rose with 
their provost-marshal, Stephen Marcel, at their head, 
threatened Charles, and slew two of his officers be- 
fore his eyes. On their demand the States-General 
were convoked, and made wholesome regulations 
as to the manner of collecting the taxes, but no one, 
except perhaps Marcel, had any real zeal or public 
spirit. Charles the Bad, of Navarre, who had pretended 
to espouse their cause, betrayed it ; the king declared 
the decisions of the States-General null and void ; and 
the crafty management of his son prevented any union 
between the malcontents. The gentry rallied, and put 
down the Jacquerie with horrible cruelty and revenge. 
The burghers of Paris found that Charles the Bad only 
wanted to gain the throne, and Marcel would have 
proclaimed him ; but those who thought him even worse 
than his cousins of Valois admitted the other Charles, 
by whom Marcel and his partisans were put to death. 
The attempt at reform thus ended in talk and murder, 
and all fell back into the same state of misery and 
oppression. 

4. The Peace of Bretigny. — This Charles, 
eldest son of John, obtained by purchase the imperial 
fief of Vienne, of which the counts had always been 
called Dauphins, a title thenceforth borne by the heir 
apparent of the kingdom. His father's captivity and 



30 FRANCE, [chap. 

the submission of Paris left him master of the realm : 



but he did little to defend it when Edward III. again 
attacked it, and in 1360 he was forced to bow to the 
terms which the English king demanded as the price 
of peace. The Peace of Bretigny permitted King 
John to ransom himself, but resigned to England the 
sovereignty over the duchy of Aquitaine, and left 
Calais and Ponthieu in the hands of Edward III. 
John died in 1364, before his ransom was paid, and 
his son mounted the throne as Charles V . Charles 
showed himself from this time a wary, able man, and 
did much to regain what had been lost by craftily 
watching his opportunity. The war went on between 
the allies of each party, though the French and 
English kings professed to be at peace ; and at the 
batde of Cocherel, in 1364, Charles the Bad was 
defeated, and forced to make peace with France. 
On the other hand, the French party in Brittany, 
led by Charles de Blois and the gallant Breton 
knight, Bertrand du Guesclin, were routed, the same 
year, by the English party under Sir John Chandos ; 
Charles de Blois was killed, and the house of Mont- 
fort estabhshed in the duchy. These years of war 
had created a dreadful class of men, namely, hired 
soldiers of all nations, who, under some noted leader, 
sold their services to whatever prince might need them, 
under the name of Free Companies, and when un- 
employed lived by plunder. The peace had only 



II.] RENEWAL OF THE WAR. 31 

let these wretches loose on the peasants. Some had 
seized castles, whence they could plunder travellers ; 
others roamed the country, preying on the miserable 
peasants, who, fleeced as they were by king, barons, 
and clergy, were tortured and murdered by these 
ruffians, so that many lived in holes in the ground 
that their dwellings might not attract attention. Ber- 
trand du Guesclin offered the king to relieve the 
country from these Free Companies by leading them 
to assist the Castilians against their tyrannical king, 
Peter the Cruel. Edward, the Black Prince, who was 
then acting as Governor of Aquitaine, took, however, 
the part of Peter, and defeated Du Guesclin at the 
batde of Navarete, on the Ebro, in 1367. 

5. Renew^al of the War. — This expedition 
ruined the prince's health, and exhausted his treasury. 
A hearth-tax was laid on the inhabitants of Aquitaine, 
and they appealed against it to the King of France, 
although, by the Peace of Bretigny, he had given up 
all right to hear appeals as suzerain. The treaty, 
however, was still not formally settled, and on this 
ground Charles received their complaint. The war 
thus began again, and the sword of the Constable of 
France — the highest military dignity of the realm 
— was given to Du Guesclin, but only on condition 
that he would avoid pitched battles, and merely harass 
the English and take their castles. This policy was 



32 FRANCE. [CHAP. 

SO strictly followed, that the Duke of Lancaster was 
allowed to march from Brittany to Gascony without 
meeting an enemy in the field; and when King 
Edward III. made his sixth and last invasion, nearly 
to the walls of Paris, he was only turned back by 
famine, and by a tremendous thunderstorm, which 
made him believe that Heaven was against him. 
Du Guesclin died while besieging a castle, and such 
was his fame that the English captain would place 
the keys in no hand but that of his corpse. The 
Constable's sword was given to Oliver de Clisson, also a 
Breton, and called the " Butcher," because he gave 
no quarter to the English in revenge for the death 
of his brother. The Bretons were, almost to a man, 
of the French party, having been offended by the 
insolence and oppression of the English ; and John 
de Montfort, after clinging to the King of England 
as long as possible, was forced to make his peace at 
length with Charles. Charles V. had nearly regained 
all that had been lost, when, in 1380 his death left 
the kingdom to his son. 

6. House of Burgundy. — Charles VI. was a 
boy of nine years old, motherless, and beset with am- 
bitious uncles. These uncles were Louis, Duke of 
Anjou, to whom Queen Joanna, the last of the earHer 
Angevin line in Naples, bequeathed her rights ; John, 
Duke of Berry, a weak time-server ; and Philip, the 



n.] HOUSE OF BURGUNDY. 33 

ablest and most honest of the three. His grandmother 
Joan, the wife of Phihp VI., had been heiress of the 
duchy and county of Burgundy, and these now became 
his inheritance, giving him the richest part of France. 
By still better fortune he had married Margaret, the 
only child of Louis, Count of Flanders. Flanders 
contained the great cloth-manufacturing towns of 
Europe — Ghent, Bruges, Ypres, etc., all wealthy and 
independent, and much inclined to close alliance 
with England, whence they obtained their wool, while 
their counts were equally devoted to France. Just 
as Count Louis II. had, for his lawless rapacity, 
been driven out of Ghent by Jacob van Arteveldt^ 
so his son, Louis III., was expelled by Philip van 
Arteveldt, son to Jacob. Charles had been disgusted 
by Louis's coarse violence, and would not help him ; 
but after the old king's death, Philip of Burgundy 
used his influence in the council to conduct the whole 
power of France to Flanders, where Arteveldt was 
defeated and trodden to death in the battle of Ros- 
becque, in 1382. On the count's death, Philip suc- 
ceeded him as Count of Flanders in right of his wife ; 
and thus was laid the foundation of the powerful and 
wealthy house of Burgundy, which for four genera- 
tions almost overshadowed the crown of France. 

7. Insanity of Charles VI. — The Constable, 
Clisson, was much hated bv the Duke of Brittany, 



34 FRANCE. [chap. 

and an attack which was made on him in the streets 
of Paris was clearly traced to Montfort. The young 
king, who was much attached to Clisson, set forth 
to exact punishment. On his way, a madman rushed 
out of a forest and called out, " King, you are 
betrayed ! " Charles was much frightened, and further 
seems to have had a sunstroke, for he at once became 
insane. He recovered for a time ; but at Christmas, 
while he and five others were dancing, disguised as 
wild men, their garments of pitched flax caught fire. 
Four were burnt, and the shock brought back the 
king's madness. He became subject to fits of insanity 
of longer or shorter duration, and in their intervals he 
seems to have been almost imbecile. No provision 
had then been made for the contingency of a mad 
king. The condition of the country became worse 
than ever, and power was grasped at by whoever 
could obtain it. Of the king's three uncles, the Duke 
of Anjou and his sons were generally engrossed by a 
vain struggle to obtain Naples; the Duke of Berry 
was dull and weak; and the chief struggle for influence 
was between Philip of Burgundy and his son, John 
the Fearless, on the one hand, and on the other the 
king's wife, Isabel of Bavaria, and his brother Louis, 
Duke of Orleans, who was suspected of being her 
lover ; while the unhappy king and his little children 
were left in a wretched state, often scarcely provided 
with clothes or food. 



II.] BURGUNDIANS AND ARMAGNACS. 35 

8. Burgundians and Armagnacs. — Matters 
grew worse after the death of Duke PhiHp in 1404; 
and in 1407, just after a seeming reconciHation, the 
Duke of Orleans was murdered in the streets of Paris 
by servants of John the Fearless. Louis of Orleans had 
been a vain, foolish man, heedless of all save his own 
pleasure, but his death increased the misery of France 
through the long and deadly struggle for vengeance 
that followed. The king was helpless, and the children 
of the Duke of Orleans were young; but their cause 
was taken up by a Gascon noble, Bernard, Count of 
Armagnac, whose name the party took. The Duke 
of Burgundy was always popular in Paris, where the 
people, led by the Guild of Butchers, were so devoted 
to him that he ventured to have a sermon preached at 
the university, justifying the murder. There was again 
a feeble attempt at reform made by the burghers ; but, 
as before, the more violent and lawless were guilty of 
such excesses that the opposite party were called in 
to put them down. The Armagnacs were admitted 
into Paris, and took a terrible vengeance on the 
Butchers and on all adherents of Burgundy, in the 
name of the Dauphin Louis, the king's eldest son, 
a weak, dissipated youth, who was entirely led by the 
Count of Armagnac. 

9. Invasion of Henry V. — All this time the 
war with England had smouldered on, only broken by 



36 FRANCE. [chap. 

brief truces j and when France was in this wretched 
state Henry V. renewed the claim of Edward III., and 
in 14 1 5 landed before Harfleur. After delaying till 
he had taken the city, the dauphin called together the 
whole nobility of the kingdom, and advanced against 
Henry, who, like Edward IH., had been obliged to 
leave Normandy and march towards Calais in search 
of supplies. The armies met at Agincourt, where, 
though the French greatly outnumbered the English, 
the skill of Henry and the folly and confusion of the 
dauphin's army led to a total defeat, and the cap- 
tivity of half the chief men in France of the Armagnac 
party — among them the young Duke of Orleans. It 
was Henry V.'s policy to treat France, not as a 
conquest, but as an inheritance ; and he therefore 
refused to let these captives be ransomed till he 
should have reduced the country to obedience, while 
he treated all the places that submitted to him with 
great kindness. The Duke of Burgundy held aloof 
from the contest, and the Armagnacs, who ruled in 
Paris, were too weak or too careless to send aid 
to Rouen, which was taken by Henry after a 
long siege. The Dauphin Louis died in 141 7; his 
next brother, John, who was more inclined to Bur- 
gundy, did not survive him a year; and the third 
brother, Charles, a mere boy, was in the hands of the 
Armagnacs. In 141 8 their reckless misuse of power 
provoked the citizens of Paris into letting in the Bur- 



II.] TREATY OF TROYES. 37 

gundians, when an unspeakably horrible massacre 
took place. Bernard of Armagnac himself was killed ; 
his naked corpse, scored with his red cross, was 
dragged about the streets ; and men, women, and even 
infants of his party were slaughtered pitilessly. Tan- 
neguy Duchatel, one of his partisans, carried off the 
dauphin; but the queen, weary of Armagnac inso- 
lence, had joined the Burgundian party. 

10. Treaty of Troyes. — Meanwhile Henry V. 
continued to advance, and John of Burgundy felt 
the need of joining the whole strength of France 
against him, and made overtures to the dauphin. 
Duchatel, either fearing to be overshadowed by his 
power, or else in revenge for Orleans and Armagnac, 
no sooner saw that a reconciliation was likely to 
take place, than he murdered John the Fearless 
before the dauphin's eyes, at a conference on the 
bridge of Montereau-sur-Yonne (141 9). John's wound 
was said to be the hole which let the English into 
France. His son Philip, the new Duke of Bur- 
gundy, viewing the dauphin as guilty of his death, 
went over with all his forces to Henry V., taking 
with him the queen and the poor helpless king. 
At the treaty of Troyes, in 1420, Henry was de- 
clared regent, and heir of the kingdom, at the 
same time as he received the hand of Catherine, 
daughter of Charles VI. This gave him Paris and 



38 FRANCE, [chap. 

all the chief cities in northern France ; but the 
Armagnacs held the south, with the Dauphin Charles 
at their head. Charles was declared an outlaw by 
his father's court, but he was in truth the leader of 
what had become the national and patriotic cause. 
During this time, after a long struggle and schism, 
the Pope again returned to Rome. 

II. The Maid of Orleans. — When Henry V. 
died in 1422, and the unhappy Charles a few weeks 
later, the infant Henry VI. was proclaimed King of 
France as well as of England, at both Paris and Lon- 
don, while Chai'les F/Zwasonly proclaimed at Bourges, 
and a few other places in the south. Charles was of 
a slow, sluggish nature, and the men around him 
were selfish and pleasure-loving intriguers, who kept 
aloof all the bolder spirits from him. The brother of 
Henry V., John, Duke of Bedford, ruled all the country 
north of the Loire, with Rouen as his head-quarters. 
For seven years little was done ; but in 1429 he 
caused Orleans to be besieged. The city held out 
bravely, all France looked on anxiously, and a young 
peasant girl, named Joan d'Arc, believed herself called 
by voices from the saints to rescue the city, and lead 
the king to his coronation at Rheims. With difficulty 
she obtained a hearing of the king, and was allowed 
to proceed to Orleans. Leading the army with a 
consecrated sword, which she never stained with 



II.] THE MAID OF ORLEANS. 



39 



blood, she filled the French with confidence, the Eng- 
lish with fear as of a witch, and thus she gained the 
day wherever she appeared. Orleans was saved, and 
she then conducted Charles VII. to Rheims, and stood 
beside his throne when he was crowned. Then she 
said her work was done, and would have returned 
home ; but, though the wretched king and his court 
never appreciated her, they thought her useful with 
the soldiers, and would not let her leave them. She 
had lost her heart and hope, and the men began to 
be angered at her for putting down all vice and foul 
language. The captains were envious of her ; and at 
last, when she had led a sally out of the besieged 
town of Compiegne, the gates were shut, and she was 
made prisoner by a Burgundian, John of Luxembourg. 
The Burgundians hated her even more than the Eng- 
lish. The inquisitor was of their party, and a court 
was held at Rouen, which condemned her to die as a 
witch. Bedford consented, but left the city before the 
execution. Her own king made no effort to save her, 
though, many years later, he caused enquiries to be 
made, established her innocence, ennobled her family, 
and freed her village from taxation. 

12. Recovery of France (1434 — 1450). — But 
though Joan was gone, her work lasted. The Con- 
stable, Artur of Richmond, the Count of Dunois, 
and other brave leaders, continued to attack the 



40 FRANCE. [chap. 

English. After seventeen years' vengeance for his 
father's death, the Duke of Burgundy made his peace 
with Charles by a treaty at Arras, on condition of 
paying no more homage, in 1434. Bedford died 
soon after, and there were nothing but disputes 
among the English. Paris opened its gates to the 
king, and Charles, almost in spite of himself, was 
restored. An able merchant, named Jacques Coeur, 
lent him money which equipped his men for the 
recovery of Normandy, and he himself, waking into 
activity, took Rouen and the other cities on the coast. 

13. Conquest of Aquitaine (1450). — By these 
successes Charles had recovered all, save Calais, 
that Henry V. or Edward III. had taken from 
France. But he was now able to do more. The 
one province of the south which the French kings 
had never been able to win was Guienne, the duchy 
on the river Garonne. Guienne had been a part of 
Eleanor's inheritance, and passed through her to the 
English kings ; but though they had lost all else, 
the hatred of its inhabitants to the French enabled 
them to retain this, and Guienne had never yet 
passed under French rule. It was wrested, how- 
ever, from Eleanor's descendants in this flood-tide of 
conquest Bordeaux held out as long as it could, but 
Henry VI. could send no aid, and it was forced to 
yield. Two years later, brave old Lord Talbot led 



II.] THE STANDING ARMY. 41 

5000 men to recover the duchy, and was gladly 
welcomed ; but he was slain in the battle of Castillon, 
fighting like a lion. His two sons fell beside him, and 
his army was broken. Bordeaux again surrendered, 
and the French kings at last found themselves master 
of the great fief of the south. Calais was, at the 
close of the great Hundred Years' War, the only 
possession left to England south of the Channel. 

14. The Standing Army (1452). — As at the end 
of the first act in the Hundred Years' War, the great 
difficulty in time of peace was the presence of the 
bands of free companions, or mercenary soldiers, who, 
when war and plunder failed them, lived by violence 
and robbery of the peasants. Charles VII., who had 
awakened into vigour, thereupon took into regular pay 
all who would submit to discipline, and the rest were 
led off on two futile expeditions into Switzerland and 
Germany, and there left to their fate. The princes 
and nobles were at first so much disgusted at the 
regulations which bound the soldiery to respect the 
magistracy, that they raised a rebellion, which was 
fostered by the Dauphin Louis, who was ready to 
do anything that could annoy his father. But he 
was soon detached from them ; the Duke of Bur- 
gundy would not assist them, and the league fell to 
pieces. Charles VII. by thus retaining companies of 

hired troops in his pay laid the foundation of the 
5 



42 FRANCE. [CHAP. ii. 

first standing army in Europe, and enabled the mon- 
archy to tread down the feudal force of the nobles. 
His government was firm and wise; and with his 
reign began better times for France. But it was 
long before it recovered from the miseries of the 
long strife. The war had kept back much of pro- 
gress. There had been grievous havoc of buildings 
in the north and centre of France; much lawlessness 
and cruelty prevailed; and yet there was a certain 
advance in learning, and much love of romance and 
the theory of chivalry. Pages of noble birth were 
bred up in castles to be first squires and then 
knights. There was immense formality and state- 
liness, the order of precedence was most minute, 
and pomp and display were wonderful. Strange 
alternations took place. One month the streets of 
Paris would be a scene of horrible famine, where 
hungry dogs, and even wolves, put an end to the 
miseries of starving, homeless children of slaughtered 
parents ; another, the people would be gazing at royal 
banquets, lasting a whole day, with allegorical ''subtle- 
ties " of jelly on the table, and pageants coming 
between the courses, where all the Virtues harangued 
in turn, or where knights delivered maidens from 
giants and " salvage men." In the south there was 
less misery and more progress. Jacques Coeur's house 
at Bourges is still a marvel of household architecture ; 
and Rene, Duke of Anjou and Count of Provence, 
was an excellent painter on glass, and also a poet. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE STRUGGLE WITH BURGUNDY. 

I. Power of Burgundy. — All the troubles of 
France, for the last 80 years, had gone to increase 
the strength of the Dukes of Burgundy. The county 
and duchy, of which Dijon .was the capital, lay in 
the most fertile district of France, and had, as we 
have seen, been conferred on PhiHp the Bold. His 
marriage had given to him Flanders, with a gallant 
nobility, and with the chief manufacturing cities of 
Northern Europe. Philip's son, John the Fearless, 
had married a lady who ultimately brought into the 
family the great imperial counties of Holland and 
Zealand j and her son, Duke Philip the Good, by 
purchase or inheritance, obtained possession of all 
the adjoining little fiefs forming the country called 
the Netherlands, some belonging to the Empire, 
some to France. Philip had turned the scale in 
the struggle between England and France, and, as 
his reward, had won the cities on the Somme. He 



44 FRANCE. [chap. 

had thus become the richest and most powerful 
prince in Europe, and seemed on the point of found- 
ing a middle state lying between France and Ger- 
many, his weak point being that the imperial fiefs in 
Lorraine and Elsass lay between his dukedom of 
Burgundy and his counties in the Netherlands. No 
European court equalled in splendour that of Philip. 
The great cities of Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, and 
the rest, though full of fierce and resolute men, paid 
him dues enough to make him the richest of princes, 
and the Flemish knights were among the boldest in 
Europe. All the arts of life, above all painting and 
domestic architecture, flourished at Brussels ; and no- 
where were troops so well equipped, burghers more 
prosperous, learning more widespread, than in his 
domains. Here, too, were the most ceremonious 
courtesy, the most splendid banquets, and the most 
wonderful display of jewels, plate, and cloth-of-gold. 
Charles VII., a clever though a cold-hearted, indo- 
lent man, let Philip alone, already seeing how the 
game would go for the future; for when the dauphin 
had quarrelled with the reigning favourite, and was 
kindly received on his flight to Burgundy, the old 
king sneered, saying that the duke was fostering the 
fox who would steal his chickens. 

2. Louis XL's Policy. — Louis XL succeeded 
his father Charles in 146 1. He was a man of great 



Til.] LOUIS XL'S POLLCY. 45 

skill and craft, with an iron will, and subtle though 
pitiless nature, who knew in what the greatness of a 
king consisted, and worked out his ends mercilessly 
and unscrupulously. The old feudal dukes and counts 
had all passed away, except the Duke of Brittany; but 
the Dukes of Orleans, Burgundy, and Anjou held 
princely appanages, and there was a turbulent nobility 
who had grown up during the wars, foreign and civil, 
and been encouraged by the favouritism of Charles VI. 
All these, feeling that Louis was their natural foe, 
united against him in what was called the "League of 
the Public Good," with his own brother, the Duke of 
Berry, and Count Charles of Charolais, who was known 
as Charles the Bold, the son of Duke Philip of Bur- 
gundy, at their head. Louis was actually defeated by 
Charles of Charolais in the battle of Montlhery; but 
he contrived so cleverly to break up the league, by 
promises to each member and by sowing dissension 
among them, that he ended by becoming more power- 
ful than before. 

3. Charles the Bold.— On the death of Philip 
the Good, in 1467, Charles the Bold succeeded to 
the duchy of Burgundy. He pursued more ardently 
the plan of forming a new kingdom of Burgundy, 
and had even hopes of being chosen Emperor. First, 
however, he had to consolidate his dominions, by 
making himself master of the countries which parted 



46 FRANCE. [chap. 

Burgundy from the Netherlands. With this view 
he obtained Elsass in pledge from its owner, a 
needy son of the house of Austria, who was never 
likely to redeem it. Lorraine had been inherited 
by Yolande, the wife of Rene, Duke of Anjou and 
titular King of Sicily, and had passed from her to 
her daughter, who had married the nearest heir in 
the male line, the Count of Vaudemont ; but Charles 
the Bold unjustly seized the dukedom, driving out 
the lawful heir, Rene de Vaudemont, son of this 
marriage. Louis, meantime, was on the watch for 
every error of Charles, and constantly sowing dangers 
in his path. Sometimes his mines exploded too soon, 
as when he had actually put himself into Charles's 
power by visiting him at Peronne at the very moment 
when his emissaries had encouraged the city of Liege 
to rise in revolt against their bishop, an ally of the 
duke; and he only bought his freedom by profuse 
promises, and by aiding Charles in a most savage de- 
struction of Liege. But after this his caution prevailed. 
He gave secret support to the adherents of Rene de 
Vaudemont, and intrigued with the Swiss, who were 
often at issue with the Burgundian bailiffs and soldiery 
in Elsass — greedy, reckless men, from whom the men 
of Elsass revolted in favour of their former Austrian 
lord. Meantime Edward IV. of England, Charles's 
brother-in-law, had planned with him an invasion of 
France and division of the kingdom, and in 1475 



III.] CHARLES THE BOLD. 47 

actually crossed the sea with a splendid host ; but 
while Charles was prevented from joining him by the 
siege of Neuss, a city in alliance with Sigismund of 
Austria, Louis met Edward on the bridge of Pecquigny, 
and by cajolery, bribery, and accusations of Charles, 
contrived to persuade him to carry home his army 
without striking a blow. That meeting was a curious 
one. A wooden barrier, like a wild beast's cage, was 
erected in the middle of the bridge, through which 
the two kings kissed one another. Edward was the 
tallest and handsomest man present, and splendidly 
attired. Louis was small and mean-looking, and clad 
in an old blue suit, with a hat decorated with little 
leaden images of the saints, but his smooth tongue 
quite overcame the duller intellect of Edward j and in 
the mean time the English soldiers were feasted and 
allowed their full swing, the French being strictly 
watched to prevent all quarrels. So skilfully did 
Louis manage, that Edward consented to make peace 
and return home. 

4. The Fall of Charles the Bold (1477).— 
Charles had become entangled in many difficulties. 
He was a harsh, stern man, much disliked ; and his 
governors in Elsass were fierce, violent men, who 
used every pretext for preying upon travellers. The 
Governor of Breisach, Hagenbach, had been put to 
death in a popular rising, aided by the Swiss of Berne, 



48 FRANCE. [chap. 

in 1474; and the men of Elsass themselves raised 
part of the sum for which the country had been 
pledged, and revolted against Charles. The Swiss 
were incited by Louis to join them; Rene of Lorraine 
made common cause with them. In two great battles, 
Granson and Morat, Charles and all his chivalry 
were beaten by the Swiss pikemen ; but he pushed on 
the war. Nancy, the chief city of Lorraine, had risen 
against him, and he besieged it. On the night of the 
5th of January, 1477, Rene led the Swiss to relieve 
the town by falling in early morning on the besiegers' 
camp. There was a terrible fight; the Burgundians 
were routed, and after long search the corpse of 
Duke Charles was found in a frozen pool, stripped, 
plundered, and covered with blood. He was the 
last of the male line of Burgundy, and its great pos- 
sessions broke up with his death. His only child, 
Marie, did not inherit the French dukedom nor the 
county, though most of the fiefs in the Low Countries, 
which could descend to the female line, were her 
undisputed portion. Louis tried, by stirring up her 
subjects, to force her into a marriage with his son 
Charles; but she threw herself on the protection of 
the house of Austria, and marrying Maximilian, son 
of the Emperor Frederick III., carried her border 
lands to swell the power of his family. 

5, Louis's Home Government. — Louis's 



III.] LOUIS'S HOME GOVERNMENT. 49 

system of repression of the nobles went on all this 
time. His counsellors were of low birth (Oliver le 
Daim, his barber, was the man he most trusted), his 
habits frugal, his manners reserved and ironical ; he 
was dreaded, hated, and distrusted, and he became con- 
stantly more bitter, suspicious, and merciless. Those 
who fell under his displeasure were imprisoned in iron 
cages, or put to death; and the more turbulent fami- 
lies, such as the house of Armagnac, were treated with 
frightful severity. But his was not wanton violence. 
He acted on a regular system of depressing the lawless 
nobility and increasing the royal authority, by bringing 
the power of the cities forward, by trusting for protec- 
tion to the standing army, chiefly of hired Scots, Swiss, 
and Italians, and by saving money. By this means he 
was able to purchase the counties of Roussillon and 
Perpignan from the King of Aragon, thus making 
the Pyrenees his frontier, and on several occa- 
sions he made his treasury fight his battles instead of 
the swords of his knights. He lived in the castle of 
Plessis les Tours, guarded by the utmost art of fortifi- 
cation, and filled with hired Scottish archers of his 
guard, whom he preferred as defenders to his own 
nobles. He was exceedingly unpopular with his 
nobles ; but the statesman and historian, Philip de 
Comines, who had gone over to him from Charles of 
Burgundy, viewed him as the best and ablest of kings. 
He did much to promote trade and manufacture, im- 



so FRANCE. [CHAP. 

proved the cities, fostered the university, and was 
in truth the first king since Philip Augustus who had 
any real sense of statesmanship. But though the 
burghers throve under him, and the lawless nobles 
were depressed, the state of the peasants was not im- 
proved ; feudal rights pressed heavily on them, and 
they were little better than savages, ground down by 
burthens imposed by their lords. 

6. Provence and Brittany. — Louis had added 
much to the French monarchy. He had won back 
Artois ; he had seized the duchy and county of 
Burgundy; he had bought Roussillon. His last 
acquisition was the county of Provence. The second 
Angevin family, beginning with Louis, the son ot 
King John, had never succeeded in gaining a footing 
in Naples, though they bore the royal title. They 
held, however, the imperial fief of Provence, and 
Louis XI., whose mother had been of this family, 
obtained from her two brothers, Rene and Charles, 
that Provence should be bequeathed to him instead 
of passing to Rene's grandson, the Duke of Lorraine. 
The Kings of France were thenceforth Counts of Pro- 
vence ; and though the county was not viewed as part 
of the kingdom, it was practically one with it. A yet 
greater acquisition was made soon after Louis's death 
in 1483. The great Celtic duchy of Brittany fell to a 
female, Anne of Brittany, and the address of Louis's 



III.] PROVENCE AND BRITTANY. 51 

daughter, the Lady of Beaujeu, who was regent of the 
realm, prevailed to secure the hand of the heiress 
for her brother, Charles VIII. Thus the crown 
of France had by purchase, conquest, or inheritance, 
obtained all the great feudal states that made up 
the country between the English Channel and the 
Pyrenees; but each still remained a separate state, 
with different laws and customs, and a separate par- 
liament in each to register laws, and to act as a court 
of justice. 



52 FRANCE. [^"AP. 



CHAPTER IV. 



THE ITALIAN WARS. 



I. Campaign of Charles VIII. (1493).— From 
grasping at province after province on their own 
border, however, the French kings were now to turn 
to wider dreams of conquest abroad. Together with 
the county of Provence, Louis XL had bought from 
King Rene all the claims of the house of Anjou. 
Among these was included a claim to the kingdom of 
Naples. Louis's son, Charles VIII., a vain and shallow 
lad, was tempted by the possession of large treasures 
and a fine army to listen to the persuasions of an 
Italian intriguer, Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, and 
put forward these pretensions, thus beginning a war 
which lasted nearly as long as the Hundred Years' 
War with England. But it was a war of aggression 
instead of a war of self-defence. Charles crossed the 
Alps in 1493, marched the whole length of Italy with- 
out opposition, and was crowned at Naples ; while its 
royal family, an illegitimate offshoot from the Kings of 



IV.] CAMPAIGN OF LOUIS XII 53 

Aragon, fled into Sicily, and called on Spain for help. 
But the insolent exactions of the French soldiery caused 
the people to rise against themj and when Charles 
returned, he was beset at Fornovo by a great league 
of Italians, over whom he gained a complete victory. 
Small and puny though he was, he fought like a lion, 
and seemed quite inspired by the ardour of combat. 
The " French fury," la furia Francese, became a pro- 
verb among the Italians. Charles neglected, however, 
to send any supplies or reinforcements to the garrisons 
he had left behind him in Naples, and they all perished 
under want, sickness, and the sword of the Spaniards. 
He was meditating another expedition, when he 
struck his head against the top of a doorway, and 
died in 1498. 

2. Campaign of Louis XII. — His cousin, 
Louis XII., married his widow, and thus prevented 
Brittany from again parting from the crown. Louis 
not only succeeded to the Angevin right to Naples, 
but through his grandmother he viewed himself as 
heir of Milan. She was Valentina Visconti, wife to 
that Duke of Orleans who had been murdered by 
John the Fearless. Louis himself never advanced 
further than to Milan, whose surrender made him 
master of Lombardy, which he held for the greater 
part of his reign. But after a while the Spanish 
king, Ferdinand, agreed with him to throw over 
6 



54 FRANCE. [chap. 

the cause of the unfortunate royal family of Naples, 
and divide that kingdom between them. Louis XI I. 
sent a brilliant army to take possession of his share, 
but the bounds of each portion had not been defined, 
and the French and Spanish troops began a war 
even while their kings were still treating with one 
another. The individual French knights did brilliant 
exploits, for indeed it was the time of the chief 
blossom of fanciful chivalry, a knight of Dauphine, 
named Bayard, called the Fearless and Stainless 
Knight, and honoured by friend and foe; but the 
Spaniards were under Gonzalo de Cordova, called 
the Great Captain, and after the battles of Cerignola 
and the Garigliano drove the French out of the king- 
dom of Naples, though the war continued in Lombardy. 

3. The Holy League. — It was an age of 

leagues. The Italians, hating French and Spaniards 
both alike, were continually forming combinations 
among themselves and with foreign powers against 
whichever happened to be the strongest. The 
chief of these was called the Holy League, because 
it was formed by Pope Julius IL, who drew into 
it Maximilian, then head of the German Empire, 
Ferdinand of Spain, and Henry VI I L of England. 
The French troops were attacked in Milan ; and 
though they gained the battle of Ravenna in 15 12, 
it was with the loss of their general, Gaston de 



IV.] THE HOLY LEAGUE. 55 

Foix, Duke of Nemours, whose death served as an 
excuse to Ferdinand of Spain for setting up a claim 
to the kingdom of Navarre. He cunningly per- 
suaded Henry VI 1 1, to aid him in the attack, by 
holding out the vain idea of going on to regain Gas- 
cony; and while one troop of EngHsh were attacking 
Pampeluna, Henry himself landed at Calais and took 
Tournay and Terouenne. The French forces were at 
the same time being chased out of Italy. However, 
when Pampeluna had been taken, and the French 
finally driven out of Lombardy, the Pope and king, 
who had gained their ends, left Henry to fight his own 
battles. He thus was induced to make peace, giving 
his young sister Mary as second wife to Louis; but 
that king over-exerted himself at the banquets, and 
died six weeks after the marriage, in 15 15. During 
this reign the waste of blood and treasure on wars 
of mere ambition was frightful, and the country had 
been heavily taxed ; but a brilliant soldiery had been 
trained up, and national vanity had much increased. 
The king, though without deserving much love, was 
so kindly in manner that he was a favourite, and was 
called the Father of the People. His first wife, 
Anne of Brittany, was an excellent and high-spirited 
woman, who kept the court of France in a better 
state than ever before or since. 

4. Campaigns of Francis I. — Louis left only 



56 FRANCE. [chap. 

two daughters, the elder of whom, Claude, carried 
Brittany to his male heir, Francis, Count of Angou- 
leine Anne of Brittany had been much averse to 
the match; but Louis said he kept his mice for his 
own cats, and gave his daughter and her duchy to 
Francis as soon as Anne was dead. Francis I. was 
one of the vainest, falsest, and most dashing of 
Frenchmen. In fact, he was an exaggeration in 
every way of the national character, and thus became 
a national hero, much overpraised. He at once 
resolved to recover Lombardy ; and after crossing the 
Alps encountered an army of Swiss troops, who had 
been hired to defend the Milanese duchy, on the field 
of Marignano. Francis had to fight a desperate battle 
with them; after which he caused Bayard to dub 
him knight, though French kings were said to be 
born knights. In gaining the victory over these 
mercenaries, who had been hitherto deemed in- 
vmcible, he opened for himself a way into Italy, and 
had all Lombardy at his feet. The Pope, Leo X., 
met 'him at Bologna, and a concordat took place, by 
which the French Church became more entirely sub- 
ject to the Pope, while in return all patronage was 
given up to the crown. The effects were soon seen 
in the increased corruption of the clergy and people. 
Francis brought home from this expedition much taste 
for Italian art and literature, and all matters of ele- 
gance and ornament made great progress from this 



IV.] CHARLES V. 57 

time. The great Italian masters worked for him ; 
Raphael painted some of his most beautiful pictures 
for him, and Leonardo da Vinci came to his court, 
and there died in his arms. His palaces, especially 
that of Blois, were exceedingly beautiful, in the new 
classic style, called the Renaissance. Great richness 
and splendour reigned at court, and set off his pre- 
tensions to romance and chivalry. Learning and 
scholarship, especially classical, increased much ; and 
the king's sister, Margaret, Queen of Navarre, was an 
excellent and highly cultivated woman, but even her 
writings prove that the whole tone of feeling was 
terribly coarse, when not vicious. 

5. Charles V. — The conquest of Lombardy made 
France the greatest power in Christendom ; but its 
king was soon to find a mighty and active rival. The 
old hatred between France and Burgundy again 
awoke. Mary of Burgundy, the daughter of Charles 
the Bold, had married Maximilian, Archduke of 
Austria and King of the Romans, though never 
actually crowned Emperor. Their son, Philip, mar- 
ried Juana, the daughter of Ferdinand, and heiress 
of Spain, who lost her senses from grief on Philip's 
untimely death; and thus the direct heir to Spain, 
Austria, and the Netherlands, was Charles, her eldest 
son. On the death of Maximilian in 15 18, Francis 
proposed himself to the electors as Emperor, but 



58 FRANCE. [chap. 

failed, in spite of bribery. Charles was chosen, and 
from that time Francis pursued him with unceasing 
hatred. The claims to Milan and Naples were re- 
newed. Francis sent troops to occupy Milan, and 
was following them himself; but the most powerful of 
all his nobles, the Duke of Bourbon, Constable ot 
France, had been alienated by an injustice perpetrated 
on him in favour of the king's mother, and deserted to 
the Spaniards, offering to assist them and the English 
in dividing France, while he reserved for himself Pro- 
vence. His desertion hindered Francis from sending 
support to the troops in Milan, who were forced to 
retreat. Bayard was shot in the spine while defending 
the rear-guard, and was left to die under a tree. The 
utmost honour was shown him by the Spaniards ; but 
when Bourbon came near him, he bade him take 
pity, not on one who was dying as a true soldier, but 
on himself as a traitor to king and country. When 
the French, in 1525, invaded Lombardy, Francis 
suffered a terrible defeat at Pavia, and was carried 
a prisoner to Madrid, where he remained for a year, 
and was only set free on making a treaty by which 
he was to give up all claims in Italy both to Naples 
and Milan, also the county of Burgundy and the 
suzerainty of those Flemish counties which had been 
fiefs of the French crown, as well as to surrrender his 
two sons as hostages for the performance of the 
conditions. 



IV.] H^JJ^S OF FRANCIS AND CHARLES. 59 

6. Wars of Francis and Charles. — All the 
rest of the king's life was an attempt to elude or break 
these conditions, against which he had protested in 
his prison, but when there was no Spaniard present 
to hear him do so. The county of Burgundy refused 
to be transferred; and the Pope, Clement VII., hating 
the Spanish power in Italy, contrived a fresh league 
against Charles, in which Francis joined, but was 
justly rewarded by the miserable loss of another army. 
His mother and Charles's aunt met at Cambrai, and 
concluded, in 1529, what was called the Ladies' Peace, 
which bore as hardly on France as the peace of 
Madrid, excepting that Charles gave up his claim to 
Burgundy. Still Francis's plans were not at an end. 
He married his second son, Henry, to Catherine, the 
only legitimate child of the great Florentine house of 
Medici, and tried to induce Charles to set up an 
Italian dukedom of Milan for the young pair; but 
when the dauphin died, and Henry became heir of 
France, Charles would not give him any footing in 
Italy. Francis never let any occasion pass of harass- 
ing the Emperor, but was always defeated. Charles 
once actually invaded Provence, but was forced to 
retreat through the devastation of the country before 
him by Montmorency, afterwards Constable of France. 
Francis, by loud complaints, and by talking much of 
his honour, contrived to make the world fancy him the 
injured man, while he was really breaking oaths in a 



6o FRANCE, [chap. 

shameless manner. At last, in 1537, the king and 
Emperor met at Aigues Mortes, and came to terms. 
Francis married, as his second wife, Charles's sister 
Eleanor, and in 1540, when Charles was in haste 
to quell a revolt in the Low Countries, he asked a 
safe conduct through France, and was splendidly 
entertained at Paris. Yet so low was the honour 
of the French, that Francis scarcely withstood the 
temptation of extorting the duchy of Milan from 
him when in his power, and gave so many broad hints 
that Charles was glad to be past the frontier. The 
war was soon renewed. Francis set up a claim to 
Savoy, as the key of Italy, allied himself with the 
Turks and Moors, and slaves taken by them on the 
coasts of Italy and Spain were actually brought into 
Marseilles. Nice was burnt; but the citadel held 
out, and as Henry VIII. had allied himself with 
the Emperor, and had taken Boulogne, Francis made 
a final peace at Crespy in 1545. He died only two 
years later, in 1547. 

7. Henry II. — His only surviving son, Henry II., 
followed the same policy. The rise of Protestantism 
was now dividing the Empire in Germany ; and Henry 
took advantage of the strife which broke out between 
Charles and the Protestant princes to attack the 
Emperor, and make conquests across the German 
border. He called himself Protector of the Liberties 



IV.] HENRY II. 6i 

of the Germans, and leagued himself with them, 
seizing Metz, which the Duke of Guise bravely de- 
fended when the Emperor tried to retake it. This 
seizure of Metz was the first attempt of France to 
make conquests in Germany, and the beginning of a 
contest between the French and German peoples 
which has gone on to the present day. After the 
siege a five years' truce was made, during which 
Charles V. resigned his crowns. His brother had 
been already elected to the Empire, but his son 
Philip II. became King of Spain and Naples, and also 
inherited the Low Countries. The Pope, Paul IV., 
who was a Neapolitan, and hated the Spanish rule, 
incited Henry, a vain, weak man, to break the truce 
and send one army to Italy, under the Duke of Guise, 
while another attacked the frontier of the Netherlands. 
Philip, assisted by the forces of his wife, Mary I. of 
England, met this last attack with an army com- 
manded by the Duke of Savoy. It advanced into 
France, and besieged St. Quentin. The French, 
under the Constable of Montmorency, came to 
relieve the city, and were utterly defeated, the 
Constable himself being made prisoner. His nephew, 
the Admiral de Coligny, held out St. Quentin to the 
last, and thus gave the country time to rally against 
the invader; and Guise was recalled in haste from 
Italy. He soon after surprised Calais, which was 
thus restored to the French^ after having been held 



62 FRANCE. [CHAP. iv. 

by the English for two hundred years. This was the 
only conquest the French retained when the final 
peace of Cateau Cambresis was made in the year 
1558, for all else that had been taken on either side 
was then restored. Savoy was given back to its duke, 
together with the hand of Henry's sister, Margaret. 
During a tournament held in honour of the wedding, 
Henry II. was mortally injured by the splinter of a 
lance, in 1559; and in the home troubles that fol- 
lowed, all pretensions to Italian power were dropped 
by France, after wars which had lasted sixty -four years. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE WARS OF RELIGION. 

I The Bourbons and Guises. — Henry H. had 
left four sons, the eldest of whom, Francis II., was 
only fifteen years oldj and the country was divided 
by two great factions — one headed by the Guise 
family, an offshoot of the house of Lorraine; the other 
by the Bourbons, who, being descended in a direct 
male line from a younger son of St. Louis, were the 
next heirs to the throne in case the house of Valois 
should become extinct. Antony, the head of the 
Bourbon family, was called King of Navarre, because 
of his marriage with Jeanne d'Albret, the queen, in her 
own right, of this Pyrenean kingdom, which was in 
fact entirely in the hands of the Spaniards, so that 
her only actual possession consisted of the little 
French counties of Foix and Beam. Antony himself 
was dull and indolent, but his wife was a woman 
of much ability; and his brother, Louis, Prince of 
Conde, was full of spirit and fire, and little inclined 



64 FRANCE. [chap. 

to brook the ascendancy which the Duke of Guise 
and his brothers enjoyed at court, partly in conse- 
quence of his exploit at Calais, and partly from being 
uncle to the young Queen Mary of Scotland, wife of 
Francis II. The Bourbons likewise headed the party 
among the nobles who hoped to profit by the king's 
youth to recover the privileges of which they had been 
gradually deprived, while the house of Guise were 
ready to maintain the power of the crown, as long as 
that meant their own power. 

2. The Reformation. — The enmity of these two 
parties was much increased by the reaction against the 
prevalent doctrines and the corruptions of the clergy. 
This reaction had begun in the reign of Francis I., 
when the Bible had been translated into French by two 
students at the University of Paris, and the king's sister, 
Margaret, Queen of Navarre, had encouraged the Re- 
formers. Francis had leagued with the German Pro- 
testants because they were foes to the Emperor, while 
he persecuted the like opinions at home to satisfy the 
Pope. John Calvin, a native of Picardy, the foremost 
French reformer, was invited to the free city of 
Geneva, and there was made chief pastor, while the 
scheme of theology called his ''Institutes" became 
the text-book of the Reformed in France, Scotland, 
and Holland. His doctrine was harsh and stern, 
aiming at the utmost simplicity of worship, and de- 



v.] THE REFORMATION, 65 

noancing the existing practices so fiercely, that the 
people, who held themselves to have been wilfully- 
led astray by their clergy, committed such violence 
in the churches that the Catholics loudly called for 
punishment on them. The shameful lives of many of 
the clergy and the wickedness of the Court had caused 
a strong reaction against them, and great tiumbers of 
both nobles and burghers became Calvinists. They 
termed themselves Sacramentarians or Reformers, but 
their nickname was Huguenots ; probably from the 
Swiss, ^^ Eidgenossen" or oath comrades. Henry H., 
like his father, protected German Lutherans and per- 
secuted French Calvinists ; but the lawyers of the 
Parliament of Paris interposed, declaring that men 
ought not to be burnt for heresy until a council of 
the Church should have condemned their opinions, 
and it was in the midst of this dispute that Henry 
was slain. 

3. The Conspiracy of Amboise. — The Guise 
family were strong Catholics; the Bourbons were 
the heads of the Huguenot party, chiefly from policy ; 
but Admiral Coligny and his brother, the Sieur 
D'Andelot, were sincere and earnest Reformers. A 
chird party, headed by the old Constable De Mont- 
morengy, was Catholic in faith, but not unwilling to 
join with the Huguenots in pulling down the Guises, 
and asserting the power of the nobility. A con- 

r 



66 FRANCE. [chap. 

spiracy for seizing the person of the king and destroy- 
ing the Guises at the castle of Amboise was detected 
in time to make it fruitless. The two Bourbon princes 
kept in the background, though Conde was universally 
known to have been the true head and mover in it, 
and he was actually brought to trial. The discovery 
only strengthened the hands of Guise. 

4. Regency of Catherine de' Medicin — Even 
then, however, Francis II. was dying, and his brother, 
Charles IX., who succeeded him in 1560, was but ten 
years old. The regency passed to his mother, the 
Florentine Catherine, a wily, cat-like woman, who had 
always hitherto been kept in the background, and 
whose chief desire was to keep things quiet by play- 
ing off one party against the other. She at once re- 
leased Conde, and favoured the Bourbons and the 
Huguenots to keep down the Guises, even permit- 
ting conferences to see whether the French Church 
could be reformed so as to satisfy the Calvinists. 
Proposals were sent by Guise's brother, the Cardinal 
of Lorraine, to the council then sitting at Trent, for 
vernacular services, the marriage of the clergy, and 
other alterations which might win back the Reformers. 
But an attack by the followers of Guise on a meeting 
of Calvinists at Vassy, of whose ringing of bells his 
mother had complained, led to the first bloodshed 
and the outbreak of a civil war. 



v.] THE RELIGIOUS WAR. 67 

5. The Religious "War. — To trace each stage 
of the war would be impossible within these limits. 
It was a war often lulled for a short time, and often 
breaking out again, and in which the actors grew 
more and more cruel. The Reformed influence 
was in the south, the Catholic in the east. Most of 
the provincial cities at first held with the Bourbons, 
for the sake of civil and religious freedom ; though 
the Guise family succeeded to the popularity of the 
Burgundian dukes in Paris. Still Catherine persuaded 
Antony of Bourbon to return to court just as his 
wife, Queen Jeanne of Navarre, had become a staunch 
Calvinist, and while dreaming of exchanging his claim 
on Navarre for the kingdom of Sardinia, he was killed 
on the Catholic side while besieging Rouen. At the 
first outbreak the Huguenots seemed to have by far 
the greatest influence. An endeavour was made to 
seize the king's person, and this led to a battle at 
Dreux. While it was doubtful Catherine actually 
declared, ''We shall have to say our prayers in 
French." Guise, however, retrieved the day, and 
though Montmorengy was made prisoner on the one 
side, Conde was taken on the other. Orleans was 
the Huguenot rallying-place, and while besieging it 
Guise himself was assassinated. His death was be- 
lieved by his family to be due to the Admiral de 
Coligny. The city of Rochelle, fortified by Jeanne of 
Navarre, became the stronghold of the Huguenots. 



68 FRANCE. [chap. 

Leader after leader fell — Montmorengy, on the one 
hand, was killed at Montcontour; Conde, on the other, 
was shot in cold blood after the fight of Jarnac. A 
truce followed, but was soon broken again, and in 
15 7 1 Coligny was the only man of age and stand- 
ing at the head of the Huguenot party; while the 
Catholics had as leaders Henry, Duke of Anjou, the 
king's brother, and Henry, Duke of Guise, both young 
men of little more than twenty. The Huguenots had 
been beaten at all points, but were still strong enough 
to have wrung from their enemies permission to hold 
meetings for public worship within unwalled towns 
and on the estates of such nobles as held with them. 

6. Catherine's Policy. — Catherine made use of 
the suspension of arms to try to detach the Huguenot 
leaders, by entangling them in the pleasures of the 
court and lowering their sense of duty. The court 
was studiously brihiant. Catherine surrounded herself 
with a bevy of ladies, called the Queen-Mother's 
Squadron, whose amusements were found for the 
whole day. The ladies sat at their tapestry frames, 
while Italian poetry and romance was read or love- 
songs sung by the gentlemen ; they had garden 
games and hunting-parties, with every opening for 
the ladies to act as sirens to any whom the queen 
wished to detach from the principles of honour and 
virtue, and bind to her service. Balls, pageants, and 



v.] MASSACRE OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW. 69 

theatricals followed in the evening, and there was 
hardly a prince or noble in France who was not 
carried away by these seductions into darker habits of 
profligacy. Jeanne of Navarre dreaded them for her 
son Henry, whom she kept as long as possible under 
training in religion, learning, and hardy habits, in 
the mountains of Beam ; and when Catherine tried to 
draw him to court by proposing a marriage between 
him" and her youngest daughter Margaret, Jeanne left 
him at home, and went herself to court. Catherine 
tried in vain to bend her will or discover her secrets, 
and her death, early in 1572, while still at court, was 
attributed to the queen-mother. 

7. Massacre of St. Bartholomew (1572). — 
Jeanne's son Henry was immediately summoned to con- 
clude the marriage, and came attended by all the most 
distinguished Huguenots, though the more wary of 
them remained at home, and the Baron of Rosny said, 
"If that wedding takes place the favours will be 
crimson." The Duke of Guise seems to have resolved 
on taking this opportunity of revenging himself for his 
father's murder, but the queen-mother was undecided 
until she found that her son Charles, who had been 
bidden to cajole and talk over the Huguenot chiefs, 
had been attracted by their honesty and uprightness, 
and was ready to throw himself into their hands, 
and escape from hers. An abortive attempt on 



70 FRANCE. [chap. 

Guise's part to murder the Admiral Coligny led to 
all the Huguenots going about armed, and making 
demonstrations which alarmed both the queen and 
the people of Paris. Guise and the Duke of Anjou 
were, therefore, allowed to work their will, and to 
rouse the bloodthirstiness of the Paris mob. At 
midnight of the 24th of August, 1572, St. Bartholo- 
mew's night, the bell of the church of St. Germain 
I'Auxerrois began to ring, and the slaughter was 
begun by men distinguished by a white sleeve. The 
king sheltered his Huguenot surgeon and nurse in 
his room. The young King of Navarre and Prince 
of Conde were threatened into conforming to the 
Church, but every other Huguenot who could be 
found was massacred, from -Coligny, who was slain 
kneeling in his bedroom by the followers of Guise, 
down to the poorest and youngest, and the streets 
resounded with the cry, " Kill ! kill ! " In every city 
where royal troops and Guisard partisans had been 
living among Huguenots, the same hideous work 
took place for three days, sparing neither age nor 
sex. How many thousands died, it is impossible 
to reckon, but the work was so wholesale that none 
were left except those in the southern cities, where the 
Huguenots had been too strong to be attacked, and 
in those castles where the seigneur was of "the religion." 
The Catholic party thought the destruction complete, 
the court went in state to return thanks for deliver^ 



v.] THE LEAGUE. 71 

ance from a supposed plot, while Coligny's body was 
hung on a gibbet. The Pope ordered public thanks- 
givings, while Queen Elizabeth put on mourning, and 
the Emperor Maximilian II., alone among Catholic 
princes, showed any horror or indignation. But the 
heart of the unhappy young king was broken by the 
guilt he had incurred. Charles IX. sank into a 
decline, and died in 1574, finding no comfort save 
in the surgeon and nurse he had saved. 

8. The League. — His brother, Henry III., who 
had been elected King of Poland, threw up that 
crown in favour of that of France. He was of a 
vain, false, weak character, superstitiously devout, and 
at the same time ferocious, so as to alienate every 
one. All were ashamed of a man who dressed in 
the extreme of foppery, with a rosary of death's 
heads at his girdle, and passed from wild dissipation 
to abject penance. He was called " the Paris Church- 
warden and the Queen's Hairdresser," for he passed 
from her toilette to the decoration of the walls of 
churches with illuminations cut out of old service- 
books. Sometimes he went about surrounded with 
little dogs, sometimes flogged himself walking bare- 
foot in a procession, and his mig7ions, or favourites, 
were the scandal of the country by their pride, 
license, and savage deeds. The war broke out 
again, and his only remaining brother, Francis, Duke 



72 FRANCE. [CHAP. 

of Alengon, an equally hateful and contemptible 
being, fled from court to the Huguenot army, hoping 
to force his brother into buying his submission; but 
when the King of Navarre had followed him and 
begun the struggle in earnest, he accepted the duchy 
of Anjou, and returned to his allegiance. Francis was 
invited by the insurgent Dutch to become their chief, 
and spent some time in Holland, but returned, un- 
successful and dying. As the king was childless, 
the next male heir was Henry of Bourbon, King of 
Navarre, who had fled from court soon after Alengon 
returned to the Huguenot faith, and was reigning in 
his two counties of Beam and Foix, the head of the 
Huguenots. In the resolve never to permit a heretic to 
wear the French crown. Guise and his party formed a 
Catholic league, to force Henry III. to choose another 
successor. Paris was devoted to Guise, and the king, 
finding himself almost a prisoner there, left the city, 
but was again mastered by the duke at Blois, and 
could so ill brook his arrogance, as to have recourse to 
assassination. He caused him to be slain at the palace 
at Blois in 1588. The fury of the League was so great 
that Henry III. was driven to take refuge with the 
King of Navarre, and they were together besieging 
Paris, when Henry III. was in his turn murdered by a 
monk, named Clement, in 1589. 

9. Henry IV. — The Leaguers proclaimed as king 



v.] HENRY IV. 73 

an old uncle of the King of Navarre, the Cardinal 
of Bourbon, but all the more moderate Catholics 
rallied round Henry of Navarre, who took the title of 
Henry IV. At Ivry, in Normandy, Henry met the 
force of Leaguers, and defeated them by his brilliant 
courage. "Follow my white plume," his last order 
to his troops, became one of the sayings the French 
love to remember. But his cause was still not won — 
Paris held out against him, animated by almost fana- 
tical fury, and while he was besieging it France was 
invaded from the Netherlands. The old Cardinal of 
Bourbon was now dead, and Philip II. considered his 
daughter Isabel, whose mother was the eldest daughter 
of Henry II., to be rightful Queen of France. He sent 
therefore his ablest general, the Duke of Parma, to co- 
operate with the Leaguers and place her on the throne. 
A war of strategy was carried on, during which Henry 
kept the enemy at bay, but could do no more, since 
the larger number of his people, though intending to 
have no king but himself, did not wish him to gain 
too easy a victory, lest in that case he should remain 
a Calvinist. However, he was only waiting to recant 
till he could do so with a good grace. He really 
preferred Catholicism, and had only been a political 
Huguenot ; and his best and most faithful adviser, the 
Baron of Rosny, better known as Duke of Sully, 
though a staunch Calvinist himself, recommended the 
change as the only means of restoring peace to the 



74 FRANCE. [chap. 

kingdom. There was little more resistance to Henry 
after he had again been received by the Church in 
1592. Paris, weary of the long war, opened its 
gates in 1593, and the inhabitants crowded round 
him with ecstasy, so that he said, " Poor people, 
they are hungry for the sight of a king ! " The 
Leaguers made their peace, and when Philip of Spain 
again attacked Henry, the young Duke of Guise was 
one of the first to hasten to the defence. Philip saw 
that there were no further hopes for his daughter, and 
peace was made in 1596. 

10. The Edict of Nantes. — Two years later, in 
1598, Henry put forth what was called the Edict of 
Nantes, because first registered in that parliament. It 
secured to the Huguenots equal civil rights with those 
of the Catholics, accepted their marriages, gave them, 
under restrictions, permission to meet for worship 
and for consultations, and granted them cities for the 
security of their rights, of which La Rochelle was the 
chief The Calvinists had been nearly exterminated 
in the north, but there were still a large number in the 
south of France, and the burghers of the chief southern 
cities were mostly Huguenot. The war had been from 
the first a very horrible one; there had been savage 
slaughter, and still more savage reprisals on each side. 
The young nobles had been trained into making a 
fashion of ferocity, and practising graceful ways of 



v.] HENRY'S PLANS. 75 

Striking death-blows. Whole districts had been laid 
waste, churches and abbeys destroyed, tombs rifled, 
and the whole population accustomed to every sort of 
horror and suffering; while nobody but Henry IV. 
himself, and the Duke of Sully, had any notion either 
of statesmanship or of religious toleration. 

II. Henry's Plans. — just as the reign of Louis 
XI. had been a period of rest and recovery from the 
English wars, so that of Henry IV. was one of re- 
storation from the ravages of thirty years of intermittent' 
civil war. The king himself not only had bright and 
engaging manners, but was a man of large heart and 
mind; and Sully did much for the welfare of the coun- 
try. Roads, canals, bridges, postal communications, 
manufactures, extended commerce, all owed their pro- 
motion to him, and brought prosperity to the burgher 
class; and the king was especially endeared to the 
peasantry by his saying that he hoped for the time 
when no cottage would be without a good fowl in its 
pot. The great silk manufactories of southern France 
chiefly arose under his encouragement, and there was 
prosperity of every kind. The Church itself was in a 
far better state than before. Some of the best men 
of any time were then living — in especial Vincent de 
Paul, who did much to improve the training of the 
parochial clergy, and who founded the order of Sisters 
of Charity, who prevented the misery of the streets of 



76 FRANCE, [chap. 

Paris from ever being so frightful as in those days when 
deserted children became the prey of wolves, dogs, 
and pigs. The nobles, who had grown into insolence 
during the wars, either as favourites of Henry III. or 
as zealous supporters of the Huguenot cause, were 
subdued and tamed. The most noted of these were 
the Duke of Bouillon, the owner of the small princi- 
pality of Sedan, who was reduced to obedience by 
the sight of Sully's formidable train of artillery ; and 
the Marshal Duke of Biron, who, thinking that Henry 
had not sufficiently rewarded his services, intrigued 
with Spain and Savoy, and was beheaded for his trea- 
son. Hatred to the house of Austria in Spain and 
Germany was as keen as ever in France ; and in 1 6 1 o 
Henry IV. was prepared for another war on the plea 
of a disputed succession to the duchy of Cleves. The 
old fanaticism still lingered in Paris, and Henry had 
been advised to beware of pageants there ; but it was 
necessary that his second wife, Mary de' Medici, 
should be crowned before he went to the war, as she 
was to be left regent. Two days after the coronation, 
as Henry was going to the arsenal to visit his old 
friend Sully, he was stabbed to the heart in his coach, 
in the streets of Paris, by a fanatic named Ravaillac. 
The French call him Le Grand Monarque; and he 
was one of the most attractive and benevolent of 
men, winning the hearts of all who approached him, 
but the immorality of his life did much to confirm the 



v.] THE STATES-GENERAL OF \ii\^. 77 

already low standard that prevailed among princes 
and nobles in France. 

12. The States-General of 1614. — Henry's 
second wife, Mary de' Medici, became regent, for her 
son, Louis XLII., was only ten years old, and indeed 
his character was so weak that his whole reign was 
only one long minority. Mary de' Medici was entirely 
under the dominion of an Italian favourite named 
Concini, and his wife, and their whole endeavour was 
to amass riches for themselves and keep the young 
king in helpless ignorance, while they undid all that 
Sully had effected, and took bribes shamelessly. The 
Prince of Conde tried to overthrow them, and, in 
hopes of strengthening herself, in 16 14 Mary sum- 
moned together the States-General. There came 464 
members, 132 for the nobles, 140 for the clergy, and 
192 for the third estate, i.e. the burghers, and these, 
being mostly lawyers and magistrates from the pro- 
vinces, were resolved to make their voices heard. 
Taxation was growing worse and worse. Not only 
was it confined to the burgher and peasant class, 
exempting the clergy and the nobles, among which last 
were included their families to the remotest generation, 
but it had become the court custom to multiply 
offices, in order to pension the nobles, and keep them 
quiet; and this, together with the expenses of the army, 

made the weight of taxation ruinous. Moreover, the 
8 



78 FRANCE. [chap. 

presentation to the civil offices held by lawyers was 
made hereditary in their families, on payment of a 
sum down, and of fees at the death of each holder. 
All these abuses were complained of ; and one of the 
deputies even told the nobility that if they did not 
learn to treat the despised classes below them as 
younger brothers, they would lay up a terrible store 
of retribution for themselves. A petition to the king 
was drawn up, and was received, but never answered. 
The doors of the house of assembly were closed — the 
members were told it was by order of the king — and 
the States-General never met again for 177 years, 
when the storm was just ready to fall. 

13. The Siege of Rochelle.— The rottenness 
of the State was chiefly owing to the nobility, who, 
as long as they were allowed to grind down their 
peasants and shine at court, had no sense of duty or 
public spirit, and hated the burghers and lawyers far too 
much to make common cause with them against the 
constantly increasing power of the throne They only 
intrigued and struggled for personal advantages and 
rivalries, and never thought of the good of the State. 
They bitterly hated Concini, the Marshal d'Ancre, as 
he had been created, but he remained in power till 
1 6 14, when one of the king's gentlemen, Albert de 
Luynes, plotted with the king himself and a few of 
his guards for his deliverance. Nothing could be 



v.] THE SIEGE OF ROCHELLE. 79 

easier than the execution. The king ordered the 
captain of the guards to arrest Concini, and kill him 
if he resisted ; and this was done. Concini was cut 
down on the steps of the Louvre, and Louis exclaimed, 
" At last I am a king." But it was not in him to be 
a king, and he never was one all his life. He only 
passed under the dominion of De Luynes, who was 
a high-spirited young noble. The Huguenots had 
been holding assemblies, which were considered more 
political than religious, and their towns of security 
were a grievance to royalty. War broke out again, 
and Louis himself went with De Luynes to be- 
siege Montauban. The place was taken, but disease 
broke out in the army, and De Luynes died. There 
was a fresh- struggle for power between the queen- 
mother and the Prince of Conde, ending in both being 
set aside by the queen's almoner, Armand de Riche- 
lieu, Bishop of Lu9on, and afterwards a cardinal, the 
ablest statesman then in Europe, who gained complete 
dominion over the king and country, and ruled them 
both with a rod of iron. The Huguenots were gra- 
dually driven out of all their strongholds, till only 
Rochelle remained to them. This city was bravely 
and patiently defended by the magistrates and the 
Duke of Rohan, with hopes of succour from England, 
until these being disconcerted by the murder of the 
Duke of Buckingham, they were forced to surrender, 
after having held out for more than a year. Louis 



8o FRANCE. [chap. v. 

XIII. entered in triumph, deprived the city of all its 
privileges, and thus in 1628 concluded the war that 
had begun by the attack of the Guisards on the con- 
gregation at Vassy, in 156 1. The lives and properties 
of the Huguenots were still secure, but all favour was 
closed against them, and every encouragement held 
out to them to join the Church. Many of the worst 
scandals had been removed, and the clergy were much 
improved; and, from whatever motive it might be, 
many of the more influential Huguenots began to 
conform to the State religion. 



CHAPTER VI. 

POWER OF THE CROWN. 

I. Richelieu's Administration. — Cardinal de 
Richelieu's whole idea of statesmanship consisted in 
making the King of France the greatest of princes 
at home and abroad. To make anything great of 
Louis XIIL, who was feeble alike in mind and body, 
was beyond any one's power, and Richelieu kept him 
in absolute subjection, allowing him a favourite with 
whom to hunt, talk, and amuse himself, but if the 
friend attempted to rouse the king to shake off the 
yoke, crushing him ruthlessly. It was the crown rather 
than the king that the cardinal exalted, putting down 
whatever resisted. Gaston, Duke of Orleans, the king's 
only brother, made a futile struggle for power, and free- 
dom of choice in marriage, but was soon overcome. 
He was spared, as being the only heir to the kingdom, 
but the Duke of Montmorency, who had been led into 
his rebellion, was brought to the block, amid the pity 
and terror of all France. Whoever seemed dangerous 



82 . FRANCE. [chap. 

to the State, or showed any spirit of independence, was 
marked by the cardinal, and suffered a hopeless im- 
prisonment, if nothing worse ; but at the same time his 
government was intelligent and able, and promoted 
prosperity, as far as was possible where there was such 
a crushing of individual spirit and enterprise. Riche- 
lieu's plan, in fact, was to found a despotism, though 
a wise and well-ordered despotism, at home, while 
he made France great by conquests abroad. And at 
this time the ambition of France found a favourable 
field in the state both of Germany and of Spain. 

2. The 'War in Flanders and Italy. — The 

Thirty Years' War had been raging in Germany for 
many years, and France had taken no part in it, 
beyond encouraging the Swedes and the Protestant 
Germans, as the enemies of the Emperor. But the 
policy of Richelieu required that the disunion 
between its Catholic and Protestant states should be 
maintained, and when things began to tend towards 
peace from mutual exhaustion, the cardinal interfered, 
and induced the Protestant party to continue the war 
by giving them money and reinforcements. A war 
had already begun in Italy on behalf of the Duke of 
Nevers, who had become heir to the duchy of Mantua, 
but whose family had lived in France so long that the 
Emperor and the King of Spain supported a more 
distant claim of the Duke of Savoy to part of the 



VI.] THE WAR IN FLANDERS AND ITALY. 83 

duchy, rather than admit a French prince into Italy. 
Richelieu was quick to seize this pretext for attacking 
Spain, for Spain was now dying into a weak power, 
and he saw in the war a means of acquiring the 
Netherlands, which belonged to the Spanish crown. 
At first nothing important was done, but the Spaniards 
and Germans were worn out, while two young and able 
captains were growing up among the French — the Vis- 
count of Turenne, younger son to the Duke of Bouillon, 
and the Duke of Enghien, eldest son of the Prince of 
Conde — and Richelieu's policy soon secured a brilliant 
career of success. Elsass, Lorraine, Artois, Catalonia, 
and Savoy, all fell into the hands of the French, and 
from a chamber of sickness the cardinal directed the 
affairs of three armies, as well as made himself feared 
and respected by the whole kingdom. Cinq Mars, the 
last favourite he had given the king, plotted his over- 
throw, with the help of the Spaniards, but was detected 
and executed, when the great minister was already at 
death's door. Richelieu recommended an Italian 
priest, Julius Mazarin, whom he had trained to work 
under him, to carry on the government, and died in the 
December of 1642. The king only survived him five 
months, dying on the 14th of May, 1643. The war was 
continued on the lines Richelieu had laid down, and 
four days after the death of Louis XIII. 'the army in 
the Low Countries gained a splendid victory at Rocroy, 
under the Duke of Enghien, entirely destroying the old 



84 FRANCE. [chap. 

Spanish infantry. The battles of Freiburg, Nordhngen, 
and Lens raised the fame of the French generals to 
the highest pitch, and in 1649 reduced the Emperor to 
make peace in the treaty of Miinster. France obtained 
as her spoil the three bishoprics, Metz, Toul, and 
Verdun, ten cities in Elsass, Brisach, and the Sundgau, 
with the Savoyard town of Pignerol; but the war with 
Spain continued till 1659, when Louis XIV. engaged to 
marry Maria Theresa, a daughter of the King of Spain. 

3. The Fronde. — When an heir had long been 
despaired of, Anne of Austria, the wife of Louis 
XIIL, had become the mother of two sons, the 
eldest of ^\\.om.* Louis XIV.^ was only five years old 
at the time of his father's death. The queen-mother 
became regent, and trusted entirely to Mazarin, who 
had become a cardinal, and pursued the policy of 
Richelieu. But what had been endured from a man by 
birth a French noble, was intolerable from a low-born 
Italian. " After the lion comes the fox," was the 
saying, and the Parliament of Paris made a last stand 
by refusing to register the royal edict for fresh taxes, 
being supported both by the burghers of Paris, and by 
a great number of the nobility, who were personally 
jealous of Mazarin. This party was called the Fronde, 
because in their discussions each man stood forth, 
launched his speech, and retreated, just as the boys 
did with slings {fronde) and stones in the streets. 



VI.] THE FRONDE. 85 

The struggle became serious, but only a few of the 
lawyers in the parliament had any real principle or 
public spirit ; all the other actors caballed out of 
jealousy and party spirit, making tools of " the men of 
the gown," whom they hated and despised, though 
mostly far their superiors in worth and intelligence. 
Anne of Austria held fast by Mazarin, and was sup- 
ported by the Duke of Enghien, whom his father's 
death had made Prince of Conde. Conde's assistance 
enabled her to blockade Paris and bring the parlia- 
ment to terms, which concluded the first act of the 
Fronde, with the banishment of Mazarin as a peace 
offering. Conde, however, became so arrogant and 
overbearing that the queen caused him to be im- 
prisoned, whereupon his wife and his other friends 
began a fresh war for his liberation, and the queen 
was forced to yield ; but he again showed himself so 
tyrannical that the queen and the parliament became 
reconciled and united to put him down, giving the 
command of the troops to Turenne. Again there was 
a battle at the gates of Paris, in which all Conde's 
friends were wounded, and he himself so entirely 
worsted that he had to go into exile, when he entered 
the Spanish service, while Mazarin returned to power 
at home. 

4. The Court of Anne of Austria. — The 
court of France, though never pure, was much im- 



86 FRANCE. [chap. 

proved during the reign of Louis XIII. and the 
regency of Anne of Austria. There was a spirit of 
romance and grace about it, somewhat cumbrous and 
stately, but outwardly pure and refined, and quite 
a step out of the gross and open vice of the former 
reigns. The Duchess de Rambouillet, a lady of 
great grace and wit, made her house the centre of a 
brilliant society, which set itself to raise and refine 
the manners, literature, and language of the time. 
No word that was considered vulgar or coarse was 
allowed to pass muster; and though in process of 
time this censorship became pedantic and petty, 
there is no doubt that much was done to purify both 
the language and the tone of thought. Poems, plays, 
epigrams, eulogiums, and even sermons were re- 
hearsed before the committee of taste in the Hotel 
de Rambouillet, and a wonderful new stimulus was 
there given, not only to ornamental but to solid 
literature. Many of the great men who made France 
illustrious were either ending or beginning their 
careers at this time. Memoir writing specially 
flourished, and the characters of the men and women 
of the court are known to us on all sides. Cardinal 
de Retz and the Duke of Rochefoucauld, both deeply 
engaged in the Fronde, have left, the one memoirs, 
the other maxims of great power of irony. Mme. 
de Motteville, one of the queen's ladies, wrote a full 
history of the court. Blaise Pascal, one of the greatest 



VI.] THE COURT OF ANNE OF AUSTRIA. 87 

geniuses of all times, was attaching himself to the 
Jansenists. This religious party, so called from 
Jansen, a Dutch priest, whose opinions were imputed 
to them, had sprung up around the reformed convent 
of Port Royal, and numbered among them some of 
the ablest and best men of the time ; but the Jesuits 
considered them to hold false doctrine, and there was 
a continual debate, ending at length in the persecu- 
tion of the Jansenists. Pascal's " Provincial Letters," 
exposing the Jesuit system, were among the ablest 
writings of the age. Philosophy, poetry, science, his- 
tory, art, were all making great progress, though there 
was a stateliness and formality in all that was said and 
done, redolent of the Spanish queen's etiquette and 
the fastidious refinement of the Hotel Rambouillet. 

5. Court of Louis XIV.— The attempt from 
the earliest times of the French monarchy had been to 
draw all government into the hands of the sovereign, 
and the suppression of the Fronde completed the 
work. Louis XIV., though ill educated, was a man 
of considerable ability, much industry, and great 
force of character, arising from a profound belief that 
France was the first country in the world, and himself 
the first of Frenchmen; and he had a magnificent 
courtesy of demeanour, which so impressed all who 
came near him as to make them his willing slaves. 
" There is enough in him to make four kings and one 



88 FRANCE. [chap. 

respectable man besides " was what Mazarin said of 
him; and when in 1661 the cardinal died, the king 
showed himself fully equal to becoming his own prime 
minister. "The State is myself," he said, and all 
centred upon him so that no room was left for 
statesmen. The court was, however, in a most bril- 
liant state. There had been an unusual outburst 
of talent of every kind in the lull after the Wars 
of Religion, and in generals, thinkers, artists, and 
men of literature, France was unusually rich. The 
king had a wonderful power of self-assertion, which 
attached them all to him almost as if he were a sort 
of divinity. The stately, elaborate Spanish etiquette 
brought in by his mother, Anne of Austria, became 
absolutely an engine of government Henry IV. had 
begun the evil custom of keeping the nobles quiet 
by giving them situations at court, with pensions 
attached, and these offices were multiplied to the most 
enormous and absurd degree, so that every royal 
personage had some hundreds of personal attendants. 
Princes of the blood and nobles of every degree were 
contented to hang about the court, crowding into 
the most narrow lodgings at Versailles, and throng- 
ing its anterooms ; and to be ordered to remain in 
the country was a most severe punishment. 

6. France under Louis XIV. — There was, in 
fact, nothing but the chase to occupy a gentleman 



VI.] FRANCE UNDER LOUIS XIV. 89 

on his own estate, for he was allowed no duties or 
responsibilities. Each province had a gov^ernor or 
intendant^ a sort of viceroy, and the administration of 
the cities was managed chiefly on the part of the king, 
even the mayors obtaining their posts by purchase. 
The unhappy peasants had to pay in the first place 
the taxes to Government, out of which were defrayed 
an intolerable number of pensions, many for useless 
offices ; next, the rents and dues which supported their 
lord's expenditure at court ; and, thirdly, the tithes and 
fees of the clergy. Besides which, they were called off 
from the cultivation of their own fields for a certain 
number of days to work at the roads ; their horses 
might be used by royal messengers ; their lord's crops 
had to be got in by their labour gratis, while their own 
were spoiling ; and, in short, the only wonder is how 
they existed at all. Their hovels and their food were 
wretched, and any attempt to amend their condition 
on the part of their lord would have been looked on 
as betokening dangerous designs, and probably have 
landed' him in the Bastille. The peasants of Brittany 
— where the old constitution had been less entirely 
ruined — and those of Anjou were in a less oppressed 
condition, and in the cities trade flourished. Colbert, 
the comptroUer-general of the finances, was so ex- 
cellent a manager that the pressure of taxation was 
endurable in his time, and he promoted new manu- 
factures, such as glass at Cherbourg, cloth at Abbeville, 
9 



90 FRANCE. [chap. 

silk at Lyons ; he also tried to promote commerce and 
colonization, and to create a navy. There was a 
great appearance of prosperity, and in every depart- 
ment there was wonderful ability. The Reformation 
had led to a considerable revival among the Roman 
Catholics themselves. The theological colleges estab- 
lished in the last reign had much improved the tone 
of the clergy. Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, was one 
of the most noted preachers who ever existed, and 
Fenelon, Archbishop of Cambrai, one of the best of 
men. A reform of discipline, begun in the convent 
of Port Royal, ended by attracting and gathering to- 
gether some of the most excellent and able persons in 
France — among them Blaise Pascal, a man of mar- 
vellous genius and depth of thought, and Racine, the 
chief French dramatic poet. Their chief director, the 
Abbot of St. Cyran, was however, a pupil of Jansen, a 
Dutch ecclesiastic, whose views on abstruse questions 
of grace were condemned by the Jesuits ; and as the 
Port- Royalists would not disown the doctrines attri- 
buted to him, they were discouraged and persecuted 
throughout Louis's reign, more because he was jealous 
of what would not bend to his will than for any real 
want of conformity. Pascal's famous " Provincial 
Letters " were put forth during this controversy ; and 
in fact, the literature of France reached its Augustan 
age during this reign, and the language acquired its 
standard perfection. 



VI.] U^AJ^ IN THE LOW COUNTRIES. 91 

7. War in the Low^ Countries. — Maria Theresa, 
the queen of Louis XIV., was the child of the first 
marriage of Phihp IV. of Spain ; and on her father's 
death in 1661, Louis, on pretext of an old law in 
Brabant, which gave the daughters of a first mar- 
riage the preference over the sons of a second, 
claimed the Low Countries from the young Charles II. 
of Spain. He thus began a war which was really a 
continuance of the old struggle between France and 
Burgundy, and of the endeavour of France to stretch 
her frontier to the Rhine. At first England, Holland, 
and Sweden united against him, and obliged him to 
make the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1668; but he 
then succeeded in bribing Charles II. of England to 
forsake the cause of the Dutch, and the war was re- 
newed in 1672. William, Prince of Orange, Louis's 
most determined enemy through life, kept up the 
spirits of the Dutch, and they obtained aid from 
Germany and Spain, through a six years' terrible war, 
in which the great Turenne was killed at Saltzbach, in 
Germany. At last, from exhaustion, all parties were 
compelled to conclude the peace of Nimeguen in 
1678. Taking advantage of undefined terms in 
this treaty, Louis seized various cities belonging to 
German princes, and likewise the free imperial city 
of Strassburg, when all Germany was too much worn 
out by the long war to offer resistance. France was 
full of self-glorification, the king was viewed almost 



92 FRANCE. [CHAP. 

as a demi-god, and the splendour of his court and 
of his buildings, especially the palace at Versailles, 
with its gardens and fountains, kept up the delusion of 
his greatness. 

8. Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. — In 
1685 Louis supposed that the Huguenots had been so 
reduced in numbers that the Edict of Nantes could 
be repealed. All freedom of worship was denied 
them ; their ministers were banished, but their flocks 
were not allowed to follow them. If taken while try- 
ing to escape, men were sent to the galleys, women 
to captivity, and children to convents for education. 
Dragoons were quartered on famihes to torment them 
into going to mass. A few made head in the wild 
moors of the Cevennes under a brave youth named 
Cavalier, and others endured severe persecution in 
the south of France. Dragoons were quartered on 
them, who made it their business to torment and 
insult them ; their marriages were declared invalid, 
their children taken from them to be educated in the 
Roman Catholic faith. A great number, amounting 
to at least 100,000, succeeded in escaping, chiefly to 
Prussia, Holland, and England, whither they carried 
many of the manufactures that Colbert had taken so 
much pains to establish. Many of those who settled 
in England were silk weavers, and a large colony was 
thus established at Spitalfields, which long kept up its 
French character. 



VI. 1 THE WAR OF THE SUCCESSION IN SPAIN. 93 

9. The 'SATar of the Palatinate. — This brutal act 
of tyranny was followed by a fresh attack on Germany. 
On the plea of a supposed inheritance of his sister-in- 
law, the Duchess of Orleans, Louis invaded the Pala- 
tinate on the Rhine, and carried on one of the most 
ferocious wars in history, while he was at the same 
time supporting the cause of his cousin, James II. of 
England, after he had fled and abdicated on the 
arrival of William of Orange. During this war, how- 
ever, that generation of able men who had grown up 
with Louis began to pass away, and his success was 
not so uniform ; while, Colbert being dead, taxation 
began to be more felt by the exhausted people, and 
peace was made at Ryswick in 1697. 

10. TheWar of the Succession in Spain. — The 

last of the four great wars of Louis's reign was far 
more unfortunate. Charles II. of Spain died child- 
less, naming as his successor a French prince, Philip, 
Duke of Anjou, the second son of the only son of 
Charles's eldest sister, the queen of Louis XIV. But 
the Powers of Europe, at the Peace of Ryswick, 
had agreed that the crown of Spain should go to 
Charles of Austria, second son of the Emperor Leo- 
pold, who was the descendant of younger sisters of 
the royal Spanish line, but did not excite the fear 
and jealousy of Europe, as did a scion of the already 
overweening house of Bourbon. This led to the War 



94 FRANCE. [chap. 

of the Spanish Succession, England and Holland sup- 
porting Charles, and fighting with Louis in Spain, 
Savoy, and the Low Countries. In Spain Louis was 
ultimately successful, and his grandson Philip V. re- 
tained the throne ; but the troops which his ally, the 
Elector of Bavaria, introduced into Germany were 
totally overthrown at Blenheim by the English army 
under the Duke of Marlborough, and the Austrian 
under Prince Eugene, a son of a younger branch of the 
house of Savoy. Eugene had been bred up in France, 
but, having bitterly offended Louis by calling him a 
stage king for show and a chess king for use, had 
entered the Emperor's service, and was one of his 
chief enemies. He aided his cousin, Duke Victor 
Amadeus of Savoy, in repulsing the French attacks 
in that quarter, gained a great victory at Turin, and 
advanced into Provence. Marlborough was likewise 
in full career of victory in the Low Countries, and 
gained there the battle of Ramillies. 

II. Peace of Utrecht — Louis had outlived his 
good fortune. His great generals and statesmen had 
passed away. The country was exhausted, famine was 
preying on the wretched peasantry, supplies could not 
be found, and one city after another, of those Louis 
had seized, was retaken. New victories at Oudenarde 
and Malplaquet were gained over the French armies ; 
and, though Louis was as resolute and undaunted as 



VI.] PEACE OF UTRECHT. 95 

ever, his affairs were in a desperate state, when he 
was saved by a sudden change of policy on the part 
of Queen Anne of England, who recalled her army 
and left her alHes to continue the contest alone. 
Eugene was not a match for France without Marl- 
borough; and the Archduke Charles, having succeeded 
his brother the Emperor, gave up his pretensions to the 
crown of Spain, so that it became possible to conclude 
a general peace at Utrecht in 1713. By this time 
Louis was seventy-five years of age, and had suffered 
grievous family losses — first by the death of his only 
son, and then of his eldest grandson, a young man 
of much promise of excellence, who, with his wife 
died of malignant measles, probably from ignorant 
medical treatment, since their infant, whose illness 
was concealed by his nurses, was the only one of the 
family who survived. The old king, in spite of 
sorrow and reverse, toiled with indomitable energy to 
the end of his reign, the longest on record, having 
lasted seventy-two years, when he died in 17 15. He 
had raised the French crown to its greatest splendour, 
but had sacrificed the country to himself and his false 
notions of greatness. 

12. The Regency. — The crown now descended 
to Louis XV., a weakly child of four years old. His 
great-grandfather had tried to provide for his good 
by leaving the chief seat in the council of regency to 



96 FRANCE. [chap. 

his own illegitimate son, the Duke of Maine, the most 
honest and conscientious man then in the family, 
but, though clever, unwise and very unpopular. His 
birth caused the appointment to be viewed as an out- 
rage by the nobility, and the king's will was set aside. 
The first prince of the blood royal, Philip, Duke of 
Orleans, the late king's nephew, became sole regent — 
a man of good ability, but of easy, indolent nature ; 
and who, in the enforced idleness of his life, had 
become dissipated and vicious beyond all imagination 
or description. He was kindly and gracious, and his 
mother said of him that he was like the prince in a fable 
whom all the fairies had endowed with gifts, except one 
malignant sprite who had prevented any favour being 
of use to him. In the general exhaustion produced 
by the wars of Louis XIV., a Scotchman named 
James Law began the great system of hollow specula- 
tion which has continued ever since to tempt people 
to their ruin. He tried raising sums of money on 
national credit, and also devised a company who were 
to lend money to found a great settlement on the 
Mississippi, the returns from which were to be enor- 
mous. Every one speculated in shares, and the 
wildest excitement prevailed. Law's house was 
mobbed by people seeking interviews with him, 
and nobles disguised themselves irt liveries to get 
access to him. Fortunes were made one week and 
lost the next, and finally the whole plan proved to 



VI.] WAR OF THE AUSTRIAN SUCCESSION. 97 

have been a mere baseless scheme; ruin followed, 
and the misery of the country increased. The Duke 
of Orleans died suddenly in 1723. The king was 
now legally of age ; but he was dull and backward, 
and little fitted for government, and the country was 
really ruled by the Duke of Bourbon, and after him 
by Cardinal Fleury, an aged statesman, but filled 
with the same schemes of ambition as Richelieu or 
Mazarin. 

13. ^War of the Austrian Succession. — Thus 
France plunged into new wars. Louis XV. married 
the daughter of Stanislas Lecksinsky, a Polish noble, 
who, after being raised to the throne, was expelled 
by Austrian intrigues and violence. Louis was obliged 
to take up arms on behalf of his father-in-law, but 
was bought off by a gift from the Emperor Charles VI. 
of the duchy of Lorraine to Stanislas, to revert to 
his daughter after his death and thus become united 
to France. Lorraine belonged to Duke Francis, the 
husband of Maria Theresa, eldest daughter to the 
Emperor, and Francis received instead the duchy of 
Tuscany ; while all the chief Powers in Europe agreed 
to the so-called Pragmatic Sanction, by which Charles 
decreed that Maria Theresa should inherit Austria 
and Hungary and the other hereditary states on her 
father's death, to the exclusion of the daughters of 
his elder brother, Joseph. When Charles VI. died. 



98 FRANCE. [chap. 

however, in 1740, a great European war began 
on this matter. Frederick II. of Prussia would 
n'either allow Maria Theresa's claim to the hereditary- 
states, nor join in electing her husband to the 
Empire; and France took part against her, sending 
Marshal Belleisle to support the Elector of Bavaria, 
who had been chosen Emperor. George II. of 
England held with Maria Theresa, and gained a 
victory over the French at Dettingen, in 1744. Louis 
XV. then joined his army, and the battle of Fonte- 
noy, in 1745, was one of the rare victories of France 
over England. Another victory followed at Laufeldt, 
but elsewhere France had had heavy losses, and in 
1 748, after the death of Charles VIL, peace was made 
at Aix-la-Chapelle. 

14. The Seven Years' War. — Louis, dull and 
selfish by nature, had been absolutely led into vice by 
his courtiers, especially the Duke of Bourbon, who 
feared his becoming active in public affairs. He had 
no sense of duty to his people; and whereas his 
great-grandfather had sought display and so-called 
glory, he cared solely for pleasure, and that of the 
grossest and most sensual order, so that his court 
was a hotbed of shameless vice. All that could be 
wrung from the impoverished country was lavished 
on the overgrown establishments of every member 
of the royal family, in pensions to nobles, and in 



VI.] THE SEVEN YEARS' WA7^, 99 

shameful amusements of the king. In 1756 another 
war broke out, in consequence of the hatreds left 
between Prussia and Austria by the former struggle. 
Maria Theresa had, by flatteries she ought to have 
disdained, gained over France to take part with her, 
and England was allied with Frederick II. In this 
war France and England chiefly fought in their 
distant possessions, where the English were uniformly 
successful ; and after ^seven years another peace fol- 
lowed, leaving the boundaries of the German states 
just where they were before, after a frightful amount of 
bloodshed. But France had had terrible losses. She 
was driven from India, and lost all her settlements in 
America and Canada. 

15. France under Louis XV. — Meantime the 
gross vice and licentiousness of the king was beyond 
description, and the nobility retained about the court 
by the system established by Louis XIV. were, if not 
his equals in crime, equally callous to the sufl"ering 
caused by the reckless expensiveness of the court, the 
whole cost of which was defrayed by the burghers and 
peasants. No taxes were asked from clergy or nobles, 
and this latter term included all sprung of a noble 
line to the utmost generation. The owner of an estate 
had no means of benefiting his tenants, even if he 
wished it ; for all matters, even of local government, 
depended on the crown. All he could do was to 



loo FRANCE. [CHAP. 

draw his income from them, and he was often .forced, 
either by poverty or by his expensive life, to strain to 
the utmost the old feudal system. If he lived at court, 
his expenses were heavy, and only partly met by his 
pension, likewise raised from the taxes paid by the 
poor farmer j if he lived in the country, he was a still 
greater tyrant, and was called by the people a hobereau, 
or kite No career was open to his younger sons, 
except in the court, the Church, or the army, and 
here they monopolized the prizes, obtaining all the 
richer dioceses and abbeys, and all the promotion in 
the army. The magistracies were almost all hereditary 
among lawyers, who had bought them for their fami- 
lies from the crown, and paid for the appointment of 
each son. The officials attached to each member of 
the royal family were almost incredible in number, 
and all paid by the taxes. The old gabelle, or salt- 
tax, had gone on ever since the English wars, and 
every member of a family had to pay it, not according 
to what they used, but what they were supposed to 
need. Every pig was rated at what he ought to 
require for salting. Every cow, sheep, or hen had a 
toll to pay to king, lord, bishop — sometimes also to 
priest and abbey. The peasant was called off from 
his own work to give the dues of labour to the roads 
or to his lord. He might not spread manure that 
could interfere with the game, nor drive away the 
partridges that ate his corn. So scanty were his 



VI.] REACTION. loi 

crops that famines slaying thousands passed unnoticed, 
and even if, by any wonder, prosperity smiled on the 
peasant, he durst not live in any kind of comfort, 
lest the stewards of his lord or of Government should 
pounce on his wealth. 

1 6. Reaction. — Meantime there was a strong feel- 
ing that change must come. Classical literature was 
studied, and Greek and Roman manners and institu- 
tions were thought ideal perfection. There was great 
disgust at the fetters of a highly artificial life in which 
every one was bound, and at the institutions which 
had been so misused. Writers arose, among whom 
Voltaire and Rousseau were the most eminent, who 
aimed at the overthrow of all the ideas which had 
come to be thus abused. The one by his caustic wit, 
the other by his enthusiastic simplicity, gained willing 
ears, and, the writers in a great Encyclopaedia then in 
course of publication, contrived to attack most of the 
notions which had been hitherto taken for granted, 
and were closely connected with faith and with gov- 
ernment. The king himself was dully aware that he 
was living on the crust of a volcano, but he said it 
would last his time ; and so it did. Louis XV. died of 
smallpox in 1774, leaving his grandsons to reap the 
harvest that generations had been sowing. 

10 



FRANCE. [chap. 



CHAPTER VII. 

TH E REVOLUTIO N. 

I. Attempts at Reform. — It was evident that 
a change must be made. Louis XVI. himself knew 
it, and slurred over the words in his coronation oath 
that bound him to extirpate heresy ; but he was a 
slow, dull man, and affairs had come to such a pass 
that a far abler man than he could hardly have dealt 
with the dead-lock above, without causing a frightful 
outbreak of the pent-up masses below. His queen, 
Marie Antoinette, was hated for being of Austrian 
birth, and, though a spotless and noble woman, her 
most trivial actions gave occasion to calumnies founded 
on the crimes of the last generation. Unfortunately, 
the king, though an honest and well-intentioned man, 
was totally unfit to guide a country through a danger- 
ous crisis. His courage was passive, his manners 
were heavy, dull, and shy, and, though steadily in- 
dustrious, he was slow of comprehension and unready 
in action ; and reformation was the more difficult 



VII. J A TTEMPTS A T REFORM. 103 

because to abolish the useless court offices would 
have been utter starvation to many of their holders, 
who had nothing but their pensions to live upon. 
Yet there was a general passion for reform ; all ranks 
alike looked to some change to free them from the 
dead-lock which made improvement impossible. The 
Government was bankrupt, while the taxes were in- 
tolerable, and the first years of the reign were spent 
in experiments. Necker, a Swiss banker, was invited 
to take the charge of the finances, and large loans 
were made to Government, for which he contrived to 
pay interest regularly ; some reduction was made in 
the expenditure; but the king's old minister, Mau- 
repas, grew jealous of his popularity, and obtained 
his dismissal. The French took the part of the 
American colonies in their revolt from England, and 
the war thus occasioned brought on an increase of the 
load of debt, the general distress increased, and it 
became necessary to devise some mode of taxing 
which might divide the burthens between the whole 
nation, instead of making the peasant^ pay all and 
the" nobles and clergy nothing. Louis decided 
on calling together the Notables, or higher nobiHty; 
but they were by no means disposed to tax them- 
selves, and only abused his ministers. He then 
resolved on convoking the whole States-General of 
the kingdom, which had never met since the reign 
of Louis XIIL 



104 FRANCE. [chap. 

2. The States-General. — No one exactly knew 
the limits of the powers of the States-General when it 
met in 1789. Nobles, clergy, and the deputies who 
represented the commonalty, all formed the assembly 
at Versailles ; and though the king would have kept 
apart these last, who were called the Tiers Etdt, or third 
estate, they refused to withdraw from the great hall of 
Versailles. The Count of Mirabeau, the younger son 
of a noble family, who sat as a deputy, declared that 
nothing short of bayonets should drive out those who 
sat by the will of the people, and Louis yielded. 
Thenceforth the votes of a noble, a bishop, or a 
deputy all counted alike. The party names of 
democrat for those who wanted to exalt the power of 
the people, and of aristocrat for those who maintained 
the privileges of the nobles, came into use, and the 
most extreme democrats were called Jacobins, from 
an old convent of Jacobin friars, where they used to 
meet. The mob of Paris, always eager, fickle, and 
often blood-thirsty, were excited to the last degree by 
the debates ; and, full of the remembrance of the 
insolence and cruelty of the nobles, sometimes rose 
and hunted down persons whom they deemed aristo- 
crats, hanging them to the iron rods by which lamps 
were suspended over the streets. The king in alarm 
drew the army nearer, and it was supposed that he 
was going to prevent all change by force of arms. 
Thereupon the citizens .enrolled themselves as a 



VII.] THE NEW CONSTITUTION. 105 

National Guard, wearing cockades of red, blue, and 
white, and commanded by La Fayette, a noble of 
democratic opinions, who had run away at seventeen 
to serve in the American War. On a report that the 
cannon of the Bastille had been pointed upon Paris, 
the mob rose in a frenzy, rushed upon it, hanged the 
guard, and absolutely tore down the old castle to its 
foundations, though they did not find a single prisoner 
in it. '' This is a revolt," said Louis, when he heard 
of it. ^' Sire, it is a revolution," was the answer. 

3. The New Constitution. — The mob had 
found out its power. The fishwomen of the markets, 
always a peculiar and privileged class, were frantically 
excited, and were sure to be foremost in all the 
demonstrations stirred up by Jacobins. There was 
a great scarcity of provisions in Paris, and this, 
together with the continual dread that reforms would 
be checked by violence, maddened the people. On 
a report that the Guards had shown enthusiasm for 
the king, the whole populace came pouring out of 
Paris to Versailles, and, after threatening the life of 
the queen, brought the family back with them to 
Paris, and kept them aJmost as prisoners while the 
Assembly, which followed them to Paris, debated on 
the new constitution. The nobles were viewed as the 
worst enemies of the nation, and all over the country 
there were risings of the peasants, headed by democrats 



io6 FRANCE. [chap, 

from the towns, who sacked their castles, and often 
seized their persons. Many fled to England and Ger- 
many, and the dread that these would unite and re- 
turn to bring back the old system continually in- 
creased the fury of the people. The Assembly, now 
known as the Constituent Assembly, swept away all 
titles and privileges, and no one was henceforth to 
bear any prefix to his name but citizen ; while at the 
same time the clergy were to renounce all the pro- 
perty of the Church, and to swear that their office 
and commission was derived from the will of the 
people alone, and that they owed no obedience save 
to the State. The estates thus yielded up were sup- 
posed to be enough to supply all State expenses with- 
out taxes ; but as they could not at once be turned 
into money, promissory notes, or assignats, were issued. 
But, as coin was scarce, these were not worth nearly 
their professed value, and the general distress was 
thus much increased. The other oath the great body 
of the clergy utterly refused, and they were therefore 
driven out of their benefices, and became objects of 
great suspicion to the democrats. All the old bound- 
aries and other distinctions between the provinces 
were destroyed, and France was divided into depart- 
ments, each of which was to elect deputies, in whose 
assembly all power was to be vested, except that the 
kin? retained a right of veto, />., of refusing his 
sanction to any measure. He swore on the 13th of 
August, 1 791, to observe this new constitution. 



VII.] THE REPUBLIC. 107 

4. The Republic. — The Constituent Assembly 
now dissolved itself, and a fresh Assembly, called 
the Legislative, took its place. For a time things 
went on more peacefully. Distrust was, however, 
deeply sown. The king was closely watched as an 
enemy ; and those of the nobles who had emigrated 
began to form armies, aided by the Germans, on the 
frontier for his rescue. This enraged the people, who 
expected that their newly won liberties would be over- 
thrown. The first time the king exercised his right of 
veto the mob rose in fury; and though they then did no 
more than threaten, on the advance of the emigrant 
army on the loth of August, 1792, a more terrible 
rising took place. The Tuilleries was sacked, the 
guards slaughtered, the unresisting king and his family 
deposed and imprisoned in the tower of the Temple. 
In terror lest the nobles in the prisons should unite 
with the emigrants, they were massacred by wholesale; 
while, with a vigour born of the excitement, the emi- 
grant armies were repulsed and beaten. The monarchy 
came to an end ; and France became a Republic, in 
which the National Convention, which followed the 
Legislative Assembly, was supreme. The more 
moderate members of this were called Girondins from 
the Gironde, the estuary of the Garonne, from the 
neighbourhood of which many of them came. They 
were able men, scholars and philosophers, full of 
schemes for reviving classical times, but wishing to 



io8 FRANCE. [chap. 

stop short of the plans of the Jacobins, of whom 
the chief was Robespierre, a lawyer from Artois, 
filled with fanatical notions of the rights of man. 
He, with a party of other violent republicans, called 
the Mountain, of whom Danton and Marat were 
most noted, set to work to destroy all that interfered 
with their plans of general equality. The guillotine, 
a recently invented machine for beheading, was set 
in all the chief market-places, and hundreds were 
put to death on the charge of "conspiring against 
the nation." Louis XVI. was executed early in 1793 ; 
and it was enough to have any sort of birthright to 
be thought dangerous and put to death. 

5. The Reign of Terror. — Horror at the blood- 
shed perpetrated by the Mountain led a young girl, 
named Charlotte Corday, to assassinate Marat, whom 
she supposed to be the chief cause of the cruelties that 
were taking place; but his death only added to the 
dread of reaction. A Committee of Public Safety was 
appointed by the Convention, and endeavoured to 
sweep away every being who either seemed adverse 
to equality, or who might inherit any claim to rank. 
The queen was put to death nine months after her 
husband; and the Girondins, who had begun to try 
to stem the tide of slaughter, soon fell under the 
denunciation of the more violent. To be accused of 
" conspiring against the State " was instantly fatal, and 



VII.] THE REIGN OF TERROJi. 109 

no one's life was safe. Danton was denounced by 
Robespierre, and perished ; and for three whole years 
the Reign of Terror lasted. The emigrants, by form- 
ing an army and advancing on France, assisted by the 
forces of Germany, only made matters worse. There 
was such a dread of the old oppressions coming back, 
that the peasants were ready to fight to the death 
against the return of the nobles. The army, where 
promotion used to go by rank instead of merit, were 
so glad of the change, that they were full of fresh 
spirit, and repulsed the army of Germans and emi- 
grants all along the frontier. The city of Lyons, 
which had tried to resist the changes, was taken, and 
frightfully used by Collot d'Herbois, a member of the 
Committee of Public Safety. The guillotine was too 
slow for him, and he had the people mown down with 
grape-shot, declaring that of this great city nothing 
should be left but a monument inscribed, " Lyons re- 
sisted liberty — Lyons is no more ! " In La Vendee — 
a district of Anjou, where the peasants were much 
attached to their clergy and nobles — they rose and 
gained such successes, that they dreamt for a little 
while of rescuing and restoring the little captive son 
of Louis XVI. ; but they were defeated and put down 
by fire and sword, and at Nantes an immense number 
of executions took place, chiefly by drowning. It was 
reckoned that no less than 18,600 persons were guillo- 
tined in the three years between 1790 and 1794, be- 



no FRANCE. [CHAP. 

sides those who died by other means. Everything was 
changed. Religion was to be done away with; the 
churches were closed; the tenth instead of the seventh 
day appointed for rest. '^ Death is an eternal sleep " 
was inscribed on the schools; and Reason, represented 
by a classically dressed woman, was enthroned in the 
cathedral of Notre Dame. At the same time a new 
era was invented, the 22nd of September, 1792 ; the 
months had new names, and the decimal measures 
of length, weight, and capacity, which are based on 
the proportions of the earth, were planned. All this 
time Robespierre really seems to have thought himself 
the benefactor of the human race ; but at last the other 
members of the Convention took courage to denounce 
him., and he, with five more, was arrested and sent to 
the guillotine. The bloodthirsty fever was over, the 
Committee of Public Safety was overthrown, and 
people breathed again. 

6. The Directory. — The chief executive power 
was placed in the hands of a Directory, consisting of 
more moderate men, and a time of much prosperity 
set in. Already in the new vigour born of the 
strong emotions of the country the armies won great 
victories, not only repelling the Germans and the 
emigrants, but uniting Holland to France. Napoleon 
Buonaparte, a Corsican officer, who was called on to 
protect the Directory from being again overawed 



viL THE DIRECTORY. in 

by the mob, became the leading spirit in France, 
through his ItaHan victories. He conquered Lom- 
bardy and Tuscany, and forced the Emperor to let 
them become republics under French protection, also 
to resign Flanders to France by the Treaty of Campo 
Formio. Buonaparte then made a descent on Egypt, 
hoping to attack India from that side, but he was 
foiled by Nelson, who destroyed his fleet in the battle 
of the Nile, and Sir Sydney Smith, who held out Acre 
against him. He hurried home to France on finding 
that the Directory had begun a fresh European war, 
seizing Switzerland, and forcing it to give up its trea- 
sures and become a repubHc on their model, and 
carrying the Pope off into captivity. All the European 
Powers had united against them, and Lombardy had 
been recovered chiefly by Russian aid ; so that Buona- 
parte, on the ground that a nation at war needed a 
less cumbrous government than a Directory, contrived 
to get himself chosen First Consul, with two inferiors, 
in 1799. 

7. The Consulate. — A great course of victories 
followed in Italy, where Buonaparte commanded in 
person, and in Germany under Moreau. Austria 
and Russia were forced to make peace, and England 
was the only country that still resisted him, till 
a general peace was made at Amiens in 1803 ; but it 
only lasted for a year, for the French failed to perform 



112 FRANCE. [CHAP. 

the conditions, and began the war afresh. In the mean 
time Buonaparte had restored rehgion and order, and so 
entirely mastered France that, in 1804, he was able 
to form the republic into an empire, and affecting to 
be another Charles the Great, he caused the Pope to 
say mass at his coronation, though he put the crown 
on his own head. A concordat with the Pope rein- 
stated the clergy, but altered the division of the 
dioceses, and put the bishops and priests in the pay 
of the State. 

8. The Empire. — The union of Italy to this new 
French Empire caused a fresh war with all Europe. 
The Austrian army, however, was defeated at Ulm 
and Austerlitz, the Prussians were entirely crushed at 
Jena, and the Russians fought two terrible but 
almost drawn battles at Eylau and Friedland. Peace 
was then made with all three at Tilsit, in 1807, 
the terms pressing exceedingly hard upon Prussia. 
Schemes of invading England were entertained by 
the Emperor, but were disconcerted by the de- 
struction of the French and Spanish fleets by Nelson 
at Trafalgar. Spain was then in alliance with France ; 
but Napoleon, treacherously getting the royal family 
into his hands, seized their kingdom, making his 
brother Joseph its king. But the Spaniards would 
not submit, and called in the English to their aid. The 
Peninsular War resulted in a series of victories on the 



VII.] THE EMPIRE. 113 

part of the English under WelHngton, while Austria, 
beginning another war, was again so crushed that the 
Emperor durst not refuse to give his daughter in 
marriage to Napoleon. However, in 181 2, the con- 
quest of Russia proved an exploit beyond Napoleon's 
powers. He reached Moscow with his Grand Army, 
but the city was burnt down immediately after his 
arrival, and he had no shelter or means of support. 
He was forced to retreat, through a fearful winter, 
without provisions and harassed by the Cossacks, 
who hung on the rear and cut off the stragglers, so 
that his whole splendid army had become a mere 
miserable, broken, straggling remnant by the time 
the survivors reached the Prussian frontier. He him- 
self had hurried back to Paris as soon as he found 
their case hopeless, to arrange his resistance to all 
Europe — for every country rose against him on his first 
disaster — and the next year was spent in a series of 
desperate battles in Germany between him and the 
Allied Powers. Liitzen and Bautzen were doubtful, but 
the two days' battle of Leipzic was a terrible defeat. 
In the year 1814, four armies — those of Austria, Russia, 
England, and Prussia — entered France at once; and 
though Napoleon resisted, stood bravely and skilfully, 
and gained single battles against Austria and Prussia, 
he could not stand against all Europe. In April the 
Allies entered Paris, and he was forced to abdicate, 
being sent under a strong guard to the little Mediter- 
11 



114 FRANCE. [CHAP. 

ranean isle of Elba. He had drained France of men 
by his constant call for soldiers, who were drawn by 
conscription from the whole country, till there were 
not enough to do the work in the fields, and foreign 
prisoners had to be employed ; but he had conferred 
on her one great benefit in the great code of laws 
called the " Code Napoleon^^ which has ever since 
continued in force. 

9. France under Napoleon. — The old laws 
and customs, varying in different provinces, had been 
swept away, so that the field was clear; and the 
system of government which Napoleon devised has 
remained practically unchanged from that time to thiso 
Everything was made to depend upon the central 
government. The Ministers of Religion, of Justice, 
of Police, of Education, etc., have the regulation of all 
interior affairs, and appoint all who work under them, 
so that nobody learns how to act alone ; and as the 
Government has been in fact ever since dependent on 
the will of the people of Paris, the whole country is 
helplessly in their hands. The army, as in almost all 
foreign nations, is raised by conscription — that is, by 
drawing lots among the young men liable to serve, 
and who can only escape by paying a substitute to 
serve in their stead; and this is generally the first 
object of the savings of a family. All feudal claims 
had been done away with, and with them the right of 



VII.] FRANCE UNDER NAPOLEON. 115 

primogeniture ; and, indeed, it is not possible for a 
testator to avoid leaving his property to be shared 
among his family, though he can make some small 
differences in the amount each receives, and thus 
estates are continually freshly divided, and some por- 
tions become very small indeed. French peasants 
are, however, most eager to own land, and are usually 
very frugal, sober, and saving ; and the country has 
gone on increasing in prosperity and comfort. It is 
true that, probably from the long habit of concealing 
any wealth they might possess, the French farmers and 
peasantry care little for display, or what we should call 
comfort, and live rough hard-working lives even while 
well off and with large hoards of wealth ; but their 
condition has been wonderfully changed for the better 
ever since the Revolution. All this has continued 
under the numerous changes that have taken place in 
the forms of government 



i6 FRANCE. [chap. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

FRANCE SINCE THE REVOLUTION. 

I. The Restoration.— The Allies left the people 
of France free to choose their Government, and they 
accepted the old royal family, who were on their 
borders awaiting a recall. The son of Louis XVI. had 
perished in the hands of his jailers, and thus the king's 
next brother, Louis XVIII., succeeded to the throne, 
bringing back a large emigrant following. Things 
were not settled down, when Napoleon, in the spring 
of 1815, escaped from Elba. The army welcomed him 
with delight, and Louis was forced to flee to Ghent. 
However, the AUies immediately rose in arms, and 
the troops of England and Prussia crushed Napoleon 
entirely at Waterloo, on the i8th of June, 1815. He 
was sent to the lonely rock of St. Helena, in the 
Atlantic, whence he could not again return to trouble 
the peace of Europe. There he died in 1821. Louis 
XVIII. was restored, and a charter was devised by 
which a limited monarchy was established, a king at 



VIII. ] REIGN OF LO UIS PHILIPPE. 1 1 7 

the head, and two chambers — one of peers, the other of 
deputies, but with a very narrow franchise. It did not, 
however, work amiss; till, after Louis's death in 1824, 
his brother, Charles X., tried to fall back on the old 
system. He checked the freedom of the press, and 
interfered with the freedom of elections. The conse- 
quence was a fresh revolution in July, 1830, happily 
with little bloodshed, but which forced Charles X. to 
go into exile with his grandchild Henry, whose father, 
the Duke of Berry, had been assassinated in 1820. 

2. Reign of Louis Philippe. — The chambers of 
deputies offered the crown to Louis Philippe, Duke 
of Orleans. He was descended from the regent ; his 
father had been one of the democratic party in the 
Revolution, and, when titles were abolished, had called 
himself Philip Egalite (Equality). This had not saved 
his head under the Reign of Terror, and his son had 
been obliged to flee and lead a wandering life, at one 
time gaining his livelihood by teaching mathematics at 
a school in Switzerland. He had recovered his family 
estates at the Restoration, and, as the head of the 
Liberal party, was very popular. He was elected 
King of the French, not of France, with a chamber of 
peers nominated for life only, and another of deputies 
elected by voters, whose qualification was two hundred 
francs, or eight pounds a year. He did his utmost to 
^ain the good will of the people, living a simple, 



ii8 FRANCE. [CHAP. 

friendly family life, and trying to merit the term of the 
*' citizen king," and in the earlier years of his reign 
he was successful. The country was prosperous, and 
a great colony was settled in Algiers, and endured a 
long and desperate war with the wild Arab tribes. A 
colony was also established in New Caledonia, in the 
Pacific -y and attempts were carried out to compensate 
thus for the losses of colonial possessions which France 
had sustained in wars with England. Discontents, 
however, began to arise, on the one hand from those 
who remembered only the successes of Buonaparte, and 
not the miseries they had caused, and on the other 
from the working-classes, who declared that the bour- 
geois, or tradespeople, had gained everything by the 
revolution of July, but they themselves nothing. Louis 
Philippe did his best to gratify and amuse the people 
by sending for the remains of Napoleon, and giving 
him a magnificent funeral and splendid monument 
among his old soldiers — the Invalides ; but his popu- 
larity was waning. In 1842 his eldest son, the Duke 
of Orleans, a favourite with the people, was killed by 
a fall from his carriage, and this was another shock to 
his throne. Two young grandsons were left ; and the 
king had also several sons, one of whom, the Duke of 
Montpensier, he gave in marriage to Louise, the sister 
and heiress presumptive to the Queen of Spain; though, 
by treaty with the other European Powers, it had beer, 
agreed that she should not marry a French prince 



VIII.] THE REVOLUTION OF 1848. 119 

unless the queen had children of her own. Ambition 
for his family was a great offence to his subjects, and 
at the same time a nobleman, the Duke de Praslin, 
who had murdered his wife, committed suicide in 
prison to avoid public execution ; and the republicans 
declared, whether justly or unjustly, that this had been 
allowed rather than let a noble die a felon's death. 

3. The Revolution of 1848. — In spite of the 
increased prosperity of the country, there was general 
disaffection. There were four parties — the Orleanists, 
who held by Louis Philippe and his minister Guizot, 
and whose badge was the tricolour; the Legitimists, 
who retained their loyalty to the exiled Henry, and 
whose symbol was the white Bourbon flag ; the Buona- 
partists j and the Republicans, whose badge was the 
red cap and flag. A demand for a franchise that 
should include the mass of the people was rejected, 
and the general displeasure poured itself out in speeches 
at political banquets. An attempt to stop one of these 
led to an uproar. The National Guard refused to fire 
on the people, and their fury rose unchecked ; so that 
the king, thinking resistance vain, signed an abdication, 
and fled to England in February, 1848. A provisional 
Government was formed, and a new constitution was 
to be arranged; but the Paris mob, who found their 
condition unchanged, and really wanted equality of 
wealth, not of rights, made disturbances again and 



I20 FRANCE. [chap. 

again, and barricaded the streets, till they were finally- 
put down by General Cavaignac, while the rest of 
France was entirely dependent on the will of the capital. 
After some months, a republic was determined on, 
which was to have a president at its head, chosen 
every five years by universal suffrage. Louis Napoleon 
Buonaparte, nephew to the great Napoleon, was the 
first president thus chosen ; and, after some struggles, 
he not only mastered Paris, but, by the help of the 
army, which was mostly Buonapartist, he dismissed the 
chamber of deputies, and imprisoned or exiled all the 
opponents whom the troops had not put to death, on 
the plea of an expected rising of the mob. This was 
called a coup d'etat, and Louis Napoleon was then 
declared president for ten years. 

4. The Second Empire. — In December, 1852, 
the president took the title of Emperor, calling himself 
Napoleon III., as successor to the young son of the 
great Napoleon. He kept up a splendid and expensive 
court, made Paris more than ever the toy-shop of the 
world, and did much to improve it by the widening of 
streets and removal of old buildings. Treaties were 
made which much improved trade, and the country 
advanced in prosperity. The reins of government 
were, however, tightly held, and nothing was so much 
avoided as the letting men think or act for them- 
selves, while their eyes were to be dazzled with 



viiL] THE SECOND EMPIRE, 121 

splendour and victory. In 1853, when Russia was 
attacking Turkey, the Emperor united with England 
in opposition, and the two armies together besieged 
Sebastopol, and fought the battles of Alma and In- 
kermann, taking the city after nearly a year's siege ; 
and then making what is known as the Treaty of 
Paris, which guaranteed the safety of Turkey so long 
as the subject Christian nations were not misused. 
In 1859 Napoleon III. joined in an attack on the 
Austrian power in Italy, and together with Victor 
Emanuel, King of Sardinia, and the Italians, gained 
two great victories at Magenta and Solferino; but 
made peace as soon as it was convenient to him, 
without regard to his promises to the King of 
Sardinia, who was obliged to purchase his consent 
to becoming King of United Italy by yielding up 
to France his old inheritance of Savoy and Nice. 
Meantime discontent began to spring up at home, and 
the Red Republican spirit was working on. The huge 
fortunes made by the successful only added to the 
sense of contrast ; secret societies were at work, and 
the Emperor, after twenty years of success, felt his 
popularity waning. 

5. The Franco-German 'War. — In 1870 the 
Spaniards, who had deposed their queen, Isabel 11. , 
made choice of a relation of the King of Prussia as 
their king. There had long been bitter jealousy between 



122 FRANCE. [CHAP. VIII. 

France and Prussia, and, though the prince refused the 
offer of Spain, the French showed such an overbearing 
spirit that a war broke out. The real desire of France 
was to obtain the much-coveted frontier of the Rhine, 
and the Emperor heated their armies with boastful 
proclamations which were but the prelude to direful 
defeats, at Weissenburg, Worth, and Forbach. At 
Sedan, the Emperor was forced to surrender himself as 
a prisoner, and the tidings no sooner arrived at Paris 
than the whole of the people turned their wrath on 
him and his family. His wife, the Empress Eugenie, 
had to flee, a republic was declared, and the city pre- 
pared to stand a siege. The Germans advanced, and 
put down all resistance in other parts of France. 
Great part of the army had been made prisoners, and, 
though there was much bravado, there was little 
steadiness or courage left among those who now took 
up arms. Paris, which was blockaded, after suffering 
much from famine, surrendered in February, 187 1; 
and peace was purchased in a treaty by which great 
part of Elsass and Lorraine, and the city of Metz, 
were given back to Germany. 



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IIL Book of Tales 60 

IV. Readings in Nature's Book 80 

V. Seven American Classics 60 

VI. Seven British Classics 60 

GEOGRAPHY. 

Appletons' New Elementary Geography 65 

Appletons' Higher Geography 1 50 

Cornell's Primary Geography 61 

Cornell's Intermediate Geography 1 20 

Cornell's Physical Geography 1 30 

Cornell's Grammar-School Geography 1 40 

Cornell's First Steps in Geography 36 

Cornell's High-School Geography 80 

Cornell's High-School Atlas 1 60 

Cornell's Outline Maps per set, 13 Maps, 13 25 

Cornell's Map-Drawing Cards per set, 45 

Patton's Natural Resources of the United States 45 



D. APPLETON & go: 8 LEADING TEXT-BOOKS. 

MATHEMATICS. 

Appletons' Primary Arithmetic $0 20 

Appletons' Elementary Arithmetic 35 

Appletons' Mental Arithmetic , 32 

A-ppletons' Practical Arithmetic 72 

A.ppletons' Higher Arithmetic 1 00 

Colin's Metric System 50 

Gillespie's Land Surveying, 2 60 

Gillespie's Leveling and Higher Surveying 2 20 

Inventional Geometry (Spencer's) . . ,• 45 

Richaids's Plane and Spherical Trigonometry, with ap- 
plications 1 '75 

GRAMMAR, COMPOSITION, AND LITERATURE. 

Bain's Composition and Rhetoric 1 50 

Ballard's Words, and how to put them together 40 

Ballard's Word-writer, 10 

Ballard's Pieces to Speak per part, 20 

Covell's Digest 80 

Gilmore's English Language and Literature 60 

Literature Primers : English Grammar— English Litera- 
ture — Philology — Classical Geography — Shake- 
speare — Studies in Bryant — Greek Literature — ^Eng- 
lish Grammar Exercises — Homer — English Compo- 
sition each, 45 

Morris's Historical English Grammar 1 00 

Northend's Memory Gems 20 

Northend's Choice Thoughts.. 30 

Northend's Gems of Thought 75 

Quackenbos's Primary Grammar 40 

Quackenbos's English Grammar 72 

Quackenbos's Illustrated Lessons in our Language 50 

Quackenbos's First Lessons in Composition 80 

Quackenbos's Composition and Rhetoric 1 30 

Spalding's English Literature 1 30 



B. APPLET ON & CO:S LEADING TEXT-BOOKS. 

GRAMMAR, ETC.-(Continued.) 

Stickney's Child's Book of Language. 4 numbers . . each, $0 10 

Teacher's edition of same 35 

Stickney's Letters and Lessons each, 20 

HISTORY. 

Bayard Taylor's History of Germany 1 50 

History Primers: Rome — Greece — Europe — Old Greek 

Life — Geography — Roman Antiquities each, 45 

Markham's History of England 1 30 

Morris's History of England 1 25 

Quackenbos's Elementary History of the United States. 60 

Quackenbos's School History of the United States 1 20 

Quackenbos's American History 1 15 

Quackenbos's Illustrated School History of the World. . 1 50 

Sewell's Child^s History of Rome 65 

" " " " Greece 65 

Willard's Synopsis of General History 2 00 

Timayenis's History of Greece. Two vols 3 50 

SCIENCE. 

Alden's Intellectual Philosophy 1 10 

Arnott's Physics 3 00 

Atkinson's Ganot's Physics 3 00 

Bain's Mental Science 1 50 

Bain's Moral Science 1 50 

Bain's Logic 2 00 

Coming's Physiology 1 50 

Deschanel's Natural Philosophy. One vol 5 '70 

In four parts each, 1 50 

Gilmore's Logic 75 

Henslow's Botanical Charts 15 75 

Huxley and Youmans's Physiology 1 50 

Le Conte's Geology 4 00 

Lockyer's Astronomy 1 50 

Lupton's Scientific Agriculture 45 



D. APPLE TON S CO:S LEADING TEXT-BOOKS. 

SCIENCE.-(Continued.) 

Morse's First Book of Zoology $1 10 

Munsell's Psychology 1 '70 

Nicholson's Geology 1 30 

Nicholson's Zoology 1 50 

Quackenbos's Natural Philosophy 1 50 

Rains's Chemical Analysis 50 

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tronomy — Botany — Logic — Inventional Geometry 

— Pianoforte-Playing — ^Political Economy, , . .each, 45 

Wilson's Logic , 1 30 

Winslow's Moral Philosophy 1 30 

Youmans's New Chemistry 1 50 

Youmans's (Miss) First Book of Botany 85 

Youmans's (Miss) Second Book of Botany 1 30 

FREE-HAND AND INDUSTHIAL DRAWING. 

Kriisi's Easy Drawing Lessons, for Kindergarten and 

Primary Schools. Three Parts each, 14 

Synthetic Series. Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4 each, 15 

Analytic Series. Nos. 5, 6, 1, 8, 9, and 10 each, 18 

Perspective Series. Nos. 11, 12, 13, and 14 each, 25 

Advanced Perspective. Nos. 15 and 16 each, 25 

Nos. 17 and 18 = , .. ,.each, 35 

Manuals, 1 to each Series. Paper, each, 45 ; cloth, each, 60 

Textile Designs. Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4 each, 30 

Nos. 5 and 6 each, 40 

Outline and Relief Designs. No. 1 30 

Nos. 2 and 3 each, 45 

Nos. 4, 5, and 6 each, 40 

Mechanical Drawing. Nos. 1, 4, and 6 each, 46 

Nos. 2, 3, and 5 each, 25 

Architectural Drawing. Nine Parts each, 45 

Green's Slate Drawing Cards. Two Parts each, 12 



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PENMANSHIP. 

Model Copy-Books, Sliding Copies per copy, $0 12 

" " Primary Series per copy, 9 

Model Practice-Book per copy, 10 

LATIN. 

Arnold's First and Second Latin Book 1 10 

Arnold's Latin Prose Composition 1 10 

Arnold's Cornelius Nepos 1 30 

Butler's Sallust's Jugurtha and Catiline , 1 50 

Cicero de Officiis 1 10 

Crosby's Quinlus Curtius Rufus 1 30 

Crosby's Sophocles's (Edipus Tyrannus 1 30 

Frieze's Quintilian 1 80 

Frieze's Virgil's ^neid 1 YO 

Frieze's Six Books of Virgil, with Vocabulary 

Harkness's Arnold's First Latin Book 1 30 

Harkness's Second Latin Book 1 10 

Harkness's Introductory Latin Book 1 10 

Harkness's Latin Grammar 1 30 

Harkness's Elements of Latin Grammar 1 10 

Harkness's Latin Reader 1 10 

Harkness's New Latin Reader 1 10 

Harkness's Latin Reader, with Exercises 1 30 

Harkness's Latin Prose Composition 1 30 

Harkness's Caesar, with Dictionary 1 30 

Harkness's Cicero 1 30 

Harkness's Cicero, with Dictionary 1 50 

Harkness's Sallust's Catiline, with Dictionary 1 15 

Harkness's Course in Caesar, Sallust, and Cicero, with DIct'y 1 75 

Johnson's Cicero's Select Orations 1 30 

Lincoln's Horace 1 50 

Lincoln's Livy 1 50 

Sewall's Latin Speaker 1 00 

Tyler's Tacitus 1 50 

Tyler's Germania and Agricola 1 10 



B. APPLET ON S CO:S LEADING TEXT-BOOKS. 

BOOK-KEEPING. 

Marsh's Single-Entry Book-keeping $1 70 

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Blanks to above, 6 books to each set per set, 1 30 

GERMAN. 

Adler's Progressive German Reader $1 30 

Adler's Hand-book of German Literature 1 30 

Adler's German Dictionary, 8vo 4 50 

" " " 12mo 2 25 

Ahn's German Grammar 85 

Kroeh's First German Reader 35 

Oehlschlaeger's Pronouncing German Reader 1 10 

Ollendorff's New Method of Learning German 1 10 

Prendergast's Mastery Series — German 45 

Roemer's Polyglot Reader — German 1 30 

Schulte's Elementary German Course 85 

Wrage's Practical German Grammar 1 30 

Wrage's German Primer 35 

Wrage's First German Reader 45 

GREEK. 

Arnold's First Greek Book 1 10 

Arnold's Greek Prose Composition 1 30 

Arnold's Second Greek Prose Composition 1 30 

Arnold's Greek Reading Book. 1 30 

Boise's Three Books of the Anabasis, with Lexicon 1 30 

Boise's Five Books of the Anabasis, with Lexicon 1 70 

Boise's Greek Prose Composition 1 30 

Boise's Anabasis .....' 1 70 

Coy's Mayor's Greek for Beginners 1 25 

Hadley's Greek Grammar 1 70 

Hadley's Elements of Greek Grammar . . 1 30 

Hadley's Greek Verbs 25 

Harkness's First Greek Book 1 30 



D. APPLET ON & aO.:S LEADING TEXT-BOOKS. 

GREEK.— (Continued.) 

Johnson's Three Books of the Iliad $1 25 

Johnson's Herodotus 1 30 

Kendrick's Greek Ollendorff. 1 50 

Kiihner's Greek Grammar 1 '70 

Owen's Xenophon's Anabasis 1 YO 

Owen's Homer's Hiad 1 '70 

Owen's Greek Header 1 70 

Owen's Acts of the Apostles 1 50 

Owen's Homer's Odyssey 1 70 

Owen's Thucydides 2 20 

Owen's Xenophon's Cyropaedia 2 20 

Kobbins's Xenophon's Memorabilia i 70 

Silber's Progressive Lessons in Greek 1 10 

Smead's Antigone , 1 50 

Smead's Philippics of Demosthenes 1 30 

Tyler's Plato's Apology and Crito 1 30 

Tyler's Plutarch 1 30 

Whiton's First Lessons in Greek 1 30 

FRENCH. 

Ahn's French Method 65 

Badois's Grammaire Anglaise 1 30 

Barbauld's Lessons for Children 65 

De Fivas's Elementary French Reader 65 

De Fivas's Classic French Reader 1 30 

De Fivas's New Grammar of French Grammars 1 10 

De Peyrac's French Children at Home 80 

De Peyrac's Comment on Parle ^ Paris 1 30 

Havet's French Manual 1 10 

Jewett's Spiers's French Dictionary, 8vo „ 2 60 

" " " . School edition 1 70 

Marcel's Rational Method — French 45 

Ollendorff's New Method of Learning French 110 

Ollendorff's First Lessons in French 65 



D. APPLET ON & CO:S LEADING TEXT-BOOKS. 

FRENCH.— (Continued.) 

Roemer's French Readers $1 30 

Rowan's Modern French Reader 1 30 

Simonne's Treatise on French Verbs 65 

Spiers and Surenne's French Dictionary, 8vo 4 50 

" " " " 12mo 2 25 

ITALIAN. 
Fontana's Elementary Grammar of the Italian Language. 

12mo 1 30 

Foresti's Italian Reader. 12mo. 1 30 

Meadows' s Italian-English Dictionary. A new revised 

edition half bound, 2 60 

Millhouse's New English-and-Italian Pronouncing and 
Explanatory Dictionary. Second edition, revised 

and improved. 2 thick vols., small 8vo. .half bound, 5 25 
Nuovo Tesoro di Scherzi, Massime, Proverbi, etc. 1 

vol., 12mo Cloth, 1 50 

Ollendorff's New Method of Learning Italian, Edited 

by F. Foresti. 12mo 1 30 

Key to do. . . 85 

Primary Lessons. 18mo 65 

Roemer's Polyglot Reader (in Itahan). Translated by 

Dr. Botta 1 ^0 

Key to same, in English 1 30 

SPANISH. 

Ahn's Spanish Grammar. 85 

De Tornos's Spanish Method 1 25 

Ollendorff's Spanish Grammar 1 00 

Prendergast's Mastery Series — Spanish 45 

Scheie de Vere's Spanish Grammar 1 00 

Yelazquez's New Spanish Reader 1 25 

Velazquez's Pronouncing Spanish Dictionary, Svo. ..... 5 00 

" " " " 12mo 1 50 

New York : D. APPLETON & CO., 1, 3, & 5 Bond Street. 



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